Tips for Driving Traffic to your Website that Won’t Cost You a Cent

So you’re just starting out your business

You now need to drive traffic to your company website.  Your new site is a big step towards generating new business because consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet to research products and services.  But how do you get traffic to your website without breaking the bank?
If you’re just starting out, you may not want to (or may not be able to) dump a bunch of money into paying someone for Search Engine optimization so that your website shows up as a top search result.  By the same token, you don’t want your website to just sit on a server taking up space. If it’s not drawing traffic it won’t generate business for you.

Google AdWords can be a helpful advertising tool to quickly get traffic to your site.  But, AdWords can be expensive.  Besides, not all web searchers are in favor of clicking on those “sponsored links.”  Searchers know those are paid advertisements and may be leery about the credibility of those paid results. This limits potential Adwords traffic.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that you can start optimizing your website and driving traffic to it that won’t cost you a penny as long as you’re willing to dedicate some time to the cause.  Here are some suggestions for getting the most out of your website without paying the big bucks.

Tailored Content-

Perhaps the most important part of your website is it’s content.  “Content is king” is a familiar phrase, and it’s entirely true on your website.  You want your website’s content to hone in on exactly what it is you do and where you do it.

You need to do more than draw traffic. You need to draw the right traffic.

If someone is is doing a search for a service or product, the two most likely search terms they’ll use will be 1- the product or service they’re looking for and 2- the location in which they hope to find this product or service.  Think about the geographic area you serve and who your target audience is.  In addition to listing your company address in the footers of all pages of your website, include some verbage on your home page that explains all of the different cities and towns you service.  Having an instance of “Aspen, Colorado” on your website will make you that much more relevant to someone searching for “Aspen CPA” or “Aspen Accounting”

Try to figure out what kind of search terms you’re clients use when looking for you and create content to cater to this traffic. Let’s continue our example of the Aspen accounting firm. CPA websites will find keywords like “Tax Preparation” will bring in a lot of calls, mostly individuals looking for tax help with an occasional new business owner sprinkled in. The keyword “business planning”, on the other hand, will generate very little traffic, but when it does bring in a call it will be a better quality of client. You’ll want to provide content for both kinds of traffic by creating informative pages specific to each service.

Go through the content on your site and tweak it so that it’s maximizing the use of those keywords you think people will be typing into a search bar when they seek out a service like yours.  Search engines crawl your website content and index it.  You want them to index it with those relevant words so that your website will show up when someone is searching for your services.

Blogs-

Another way to get a high page ranking in search results is to continually update the content on your website.  Having fresh content on your site is a signal to search engines that your site is being actively updated.  This will also give you another opportunity to add relevant content to your website if you integrate the blog directly onto your website. Google’s free Blogger tool can be integrated within an existing website, although you may need the help your web designer to do it right.  It is also possible that your web hosting solutions has a blog tool integrated in your site already.  Search engines don’t really like “stale” content that never changes.  Think about celebrities.  The more they’re in the news, the more popular they become (and the more popular they become, the more they’re in the news!)  Your website can become more popular the more it gets updated, and the more updated your site is the more popular you will become.  Updated content makes your site search-engine friendly.

This doesn’t have to be accomplished with a traditional blog.  You may just have one page of your website dedicated to frequent updates.  You don’t need a “blog” tool to have updated content.  You can treat a page on your site as though it were a blog, where you add a new heading with relevant thoughts and content to the top of the page every other day.  The bottom line is to make frequent updates so that your site doesn’t fall by the wayside in the eyes of the search engines.

Email Marketing-

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your website won’t necessarily be through search engines at all.  It will be through emailing clients and prospective clients to show them what you offer.  Because you’re already connected to the Internet in order to receive email, it’s simple for you to click on the links in an email message and be brought over to a website.  By direct emailing, you encourage people to click over to your website because you’ve made it easy for them to get there.  No searching required.  All of the links are presented right in the email.

A great free tool for email marketing is MailChimp.  You won’t be able to do high-volume marketing for free through MailChimp, but they’ll get you started.  Once you start to generate money from your site then you’ll be able to think about spending resources on higher-volume email campaigns.

Through email marketing you can send out weekly or monthly messages with timely information and tips.  Not only will clients and prospective clients appreciate the tips, but they’ll be inclined to visit your website because of them.  Write your messages in such a way that you tease the topics in your emailed message, but for the reader to view the full article they’ll have to click the “read more” link in your message to be brought over to your website which contains the full text.  Once they get to your site they then have the opportunity to click around and see what you offer.

There are a myriad of resources available that can explain how to draw traffic and optimize your website for search engines, and search engines are changing the ways they rank sites on an ongoing basis. The tips above should get you on your way without overwhelming you too much.  Remember to start out slow and work your way forward so that you don’t burn out trying to do everything all at once.

You’ll want to do some basic research on driving web traffic to your site before you get started, and decide what you’ll be able to handle on your own.