Traffic, Traffic, Traffic - How to Drive More Local Traffic to Your Small Business Website

How to Drive More Local Traffic to Your Small Business Website

In today's hyper-competitve marketplace, local businesses need to be strategic and authentic when marketing to customers. To connect with a customer, the business at its core must provide a quality service or product. This initiates the relationship between the company and the customer; but maintaining and continuing the relationship takes authentic, and consistent communication. There are many great ways for local businesses to facilitate this communication.

Establish a Presence on the Web

The first and some may argue, the most important component for any local business is to have a website or blog. A sub-component to this is having a logical or memorable domain name (URL) to accompany the site. It does no good to have a ridiculously long URL or for it to include words that are confusing or easy to misspell. Accompanying your website should be an email address for people to contact you at. This does not necessarily have to end with the name of your business as the domain; it is acceptable to use gmail or one of the other major Free email accounts when your business is a relatively small, local operation.

Get Listed

Once you have an address in cyberspace, you can then begin "listing" your business in the major Search Engines and customer review websites that are available to you. I am referring to the Search Engine Map listings and review sites such as Yelp, Yellow Book, Angie's List, etc.

Create Your Social Media Presence and Start Communicating

Creation of Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linked In, etc. profiles are the next logical step to generating exposure and communicating with your clients. Here you have an opportunity to participate in the largest social communities in the world. These days, any respectable business has to have a Facebook page, right? Each of these avenues presents an opportunity to communicate with people and promote your business. These are completely acceptable forums to say fun, motivational and irreverant things, on behalf of your business. Pictures can be easily uploaded via phones, and customers can comment, tag and promote your business among their personal social networks.

If My Business is Listed in the Search Maps and has all the Social Media Accounts, Why do I Need a Website?

Some may feel that creating a presence in on the review sites and the Search Engine Map Listings, as well as having Social Media profile "fan" and business pages within Facebook and Twitter is enough, and that having a full website or blog is unnecessary. While it is a version of communication, there are limitations to the way that you interact with people, and in a sense its really broadcasting. Interactive broadcasting. The communication exists, but not on a comprehensive and customized level. You are restricted to the limits and rules of the social media sites, and the pages themselves are only moderately customize-able. Everybody understands that you can only do so much with a tweet (of less than 200 characters); and all Facebook pages look uniform to some degree. In addition, in order to fully communicate with customers on your own turf, you must do it on your own website and blog. This creates an environment that you can control, customize and generate an authentic online environment that represents your business and is an extension of your physical store (brick and mortar).

iDriveBiz is a company that assists local businesses with creating and improving their Interactive presence and social media marketing. They take a custom approach to each client, and help companies with generating more clients and exposure.The blog based websites created by iDriveBiz, on the Swiftwebdesigner Platform, consistently generate blog postings that show up on the first page of Google, Bing and Yahoo!

When you create new blog entries on a consistent basis and post them on your website, this helps to generate completely targeted, "organic" traffic. This is because blog postings are tagged with both keywords and a time stamp. When a search engine is organizing its results to a particular search term, it organizes the results by relevance, for both keywords and time. Therefore, a new blog article posted this week, will often show up ahead of similar articles posted about the same topics (that use the same keywords), that have been posted in the past. Having a blog post show up on the first page of Google, towards the top, is a great way for any business to generate more clients and exposure. Keep in mind, it is important that the blog article is good quality as well. Thus, make sure to learn some of the basics to good blog posting as well to optimize this effort and opportunity.

For an example of this, type in the term "Igroki" into the Google Search bar. As you will learn, "Igroki" is an internationally famous performance group. They travel around the world performing the show in cities across Europe, United States and beyond. This past year, the performance was hosted in Chicago. The local Russian Radio Station, Echo of the Planet Radio1240am.com hosted the performance. Echo of the Planet posted a blog with images from the performance on the website. When you search "Igroki" in Google, you will likely find the link to that blog post towards the top of the list on the first page of Google.

The Echo of the Planet radio station website benefits from the traffic that they receive when fans of "Igroki" are searching for new photos and content of the performance, and they visit the blog post and website. If you would like to improve the exposure for your business, and generate more targeted customers, contact iDriveBiz.com. They will provide a Free Consultation for your Local Business and take care of the marketing, so you can focus on taking care of your customers.