Number two from my list of five categories of actions to get more visitors to your website.
The more likely that someone searching finds you, the more traffic your site will get. That’s the whole rationale behind high search engine rankings.
To really work, you really need to be on page one on Google for your key search terms. Most people don’t go past page one in a search, page two or three at most. And Google is the 600 pound gorilla, with over 70% of all searches.
But do you know what the number two search engine is? YouTube. Video won’t work for every business, far from it, but it’s something you need to look at.
There are a lot of ways someone could find you besides through your own high search engine rankings.
A lot of that is through searches that find other sites that then refer or link to you. Google won’t usually give you more than 2 out of the first 10 positions for your site, no matter how relevant to the search. But we’ve had situations where 8 of the 10 first page organic listings were either the client’s site or referred to it in some way. You know those searchers are going to end up on your site in a situation like that.
The various Internet Yellow Pages, as well as the many other directories, both specialized and general, generate a lot of traffic. Sometimes paid listings make sense. Minimally, you need to be in the Google and Yahoo local listings if you are in a local product or service business at all.
Blogs, Twitter, and Social Networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, generate huge amounts of traffic to sites when they “catch on” – spread by word-of-mouth. If you aren’t up on these and utilizing them, chances are you are missing out on a lot of potential.
Fan, hobbyist and association sites can be huge for traffic generation as well as improving your search engine rankings. One of our clients restores, repairs and sells parts to classic Lincoln autos. Every Lincoln enthusiast on the net, it seems, has a link to the client’s site – hundreds of them.
Of course various kinds of paid ads give you instant presence and can work very well depending. Sponsored links on search engines, ads on blogs, banner ads on news sites, affiliate programs and paid links on portal sites are most common.
The short version is an intelligent exploration of all the possibilities will pay off. I just read of someone who used Twitter to generate up to 1000 visits a day – and they accomplished that in a few weeks.
Not every way of increasing your Online Presence makes sense for every business. But you can pretty well count on it that one or more of them will.