With all of the talk about how to leverage social media to market one’s brand, we should not forget the importance of good ol’ fashioned Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Even though the internet and how most of us use it seems to be constantly changing, some of the most tried and true methods for driving traffic to your business have continued to be effective. Here are four of the ways people still are able to drive significant traffic to their business websites:
Developing Backlinks
Backlinks are links to your business’s website from another domain and are a fantastic way for search engines to rank your business as being an authority on a given topic. One of the best ways to drive traffic to your business’s website by using backlinks is to reach out to prominent bloggers and to see if they would be interested in hosting “guest” content from your website. Providing guest content to other blogs ends up being a great way for both parties to benefit: The guest blogger pepper their blog post with links to their business, and the site hosting the guest post gets free content for their blog.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is another great way to drive traffic to your business’s website. By allowing users to opt in to regularly posted newsletters about new developments relating to your business — a new price drop on a certain product, drawing attention to a proposed government regulation that might affect prices, etc — you create an additional way for your business to compete in an ever increasingly competitive space for your reader’s attentions.
Social Media Marketing
Good search engine optimization and awesome social media marketing go hand-in-hand with driving traffic to your business; having effective strategy for one and not the other spells almost certain doom for a budding business. Effective social media marketing provides awesome ways to not only acquire the aforementioned ever-important backlinks to drive traffic, but also creates additional ways for people to find your content.
In addition to allowing additional ways for people to find your website, engaging with people on social media also affords unique opportunities to brand your business through how it connects with various communities online. In all, when users are spending as much as 50 minutes per day on Facebook alone, it’s the businesses that leverage that time with those users that end up driving more traffic to their websites than their competitors that do not.
Good Content Still Reigns King
Without constantly adding new content to your business’s website, almost all of the other strategies for driving traffic to your site are dead in the water. Without new content, one has little to post about on social media, has little to offer in terms of guest blog posts and would have nothing to send their users in periodic updates in their newsletters. What’s more, search engines like Google and Bing have repeatedly made it clear that their search engine ranking algorithms prefer websites that are frequently updated to those that are not.
Since providing frequently updated and relevant content is still a pivotal part of any search engine optimization strategy, any discussion about driving traffic to one’s business website must start with and be centered around constant influxes in new content, and everything else should be around how to get that content in front of interested users.
Understanding search engine optimization, search engine marketing and social media marketing are one thing, but successfully executing strategy is another and can require meticulous planning that many small business owners simply do not have the time or patience for.
To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!
