This is a guest post by Heather from 9thSphere.com
Are you looking to see an increase in traffic coming to your website?
Sometimes it only takes a few small changes to really boost the visibility of your site.
I’ve put together a list of some tips that you can easily employ to help cast a wider net for visitors to find and visit your site.
Boost Your Local Search With Google Places
If you have a physical location, regardless if clients come to you or you go to them, you have an opportunity to claim your location with Google Places and fill out your profile for it.
This is as simple as logging into Google Places with a Gmail account and filling in your address. Once this is filled out, you will get some options to verify your business location. Remember that you must have a physical address for this.
Typically, Google will send you a postcard with a code. You input this code for verification, and then add details and pictures of your business. When people are conducting a local search, your business will show up on the map that comes up in search results with a solid profile.
Make sure to get your clients to add reviews to help add a strong social signal that you deliver a great service or product. This will help to add credibility, and could entice more people to visit your site.
Add A Blog With Value Added Content
Adding a blog allows you to cast a wider net on the Internet.
Make sure your posts are of high quality and provide solid value for the searcher. Write about common queries, issues and recent developments within your industry. It’s a good idea to only add a blog if you are going to update it regularly on a blog development timeline, otherwise people just won’t return if there isn’t enough fresh content.
Claim Your Branded Social Profiles
Jump on opportunities to claim branded URLS on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, LinkedIn and other free places.
When searchers are looking for your business by name, this helps fill out the first page with your branded pages. This pushes your competition off the front page of Google and makes sure they doesn’t show up for branded queries easily. This is simple, but highly effective.
Find Your Winners, Scrap Your Losers
Plug in Google Analytics into the back of your web design and have a deep look at organic search traffic once you have at least three months of data. You will be able to see which query generates the most visits. You can then expand on this query by writing a blog post with similar related words or topics.
Doing the above helps cast a wider and stronger net on relevant search terms for which Google already ranks you. Always pour more resources into expanding on your winners and putting less time into the products or services related to queries that don’t perform well. Building on your strengths is a solid tactic to increase your visibility online.
Get Local Citations
Having positive reviews about your business online is a great way to build credibility and give you a competitive edge. Ask your existing client base to leave reviews on sites like Yelp or local review sites. Your prospects may be looking for previous indications of success. Having reviews and citations on strong review sites may just way your prospect into going with your product or service.
Citations help confirm that a business is part of a community. It’s hard for someone to fake being a member of a professional society, or be written by a local newspaper. Those looking to support local businesses are more likely to choose companies that contribute positively to their neighbourhoods.
Mix PPC with SEO
Mixing both SEO and PPC in search results helps increase your visibility. Having both can help you communicate your products and services effectively by being able to send two messages as opposed to one.
After trying out some variations, you can change your PPC copy to what works best and then change your meta titles and descriptions to suit; almost like A-B split testing, but between SEO and PPC.
Conclusion
Using the above tips, you should be able to quickly and easily expand your online presence. These are a few easy and convenient tips that could have a significant increase on your web presence. There are many other options to increase traffic, but these are good starting points and can be easily built upon.
What ideas have helped to increase your online visibility and site traffic?
Well social websites like facebook and stumbleupon has worked for me but I have heard that twitter can bring good amount of traffic but it didn’t work for me,Can you please tell me working ways to get traffic from twitter ?
BTW,thanks for sharing this useful article.
Twitter can be a tough one. They do have an advertising platform available, but it all depends on your niche and who your customers are. You could use twitter to reach out to people who are having a conversation about your product. For example, if you are a hotel, you could drop in on conversations with @ replies to people who are talking about going on holiday or trying to find information on a location to help them out.
It is always best to reach out than to sty passive with Twitter to add value to conversations. This in turn will get you recognized and will get the word out about what you do more.
That whole active/passive thing is the one thing that keeps me from using Twitter and other social media as a primary means of generating traffic. You have to keep at it for a long time to build up your traffic. Then to keep traffic from that channel you have to remain active. If you are like me and you are doing things on a part time basis, then you will find there are better ways to invest your time. Things like SEO payoff many times over even after you have done the work only once.
Social media sites are one of the easiest and effective ways how to boost one’s online presence. Like Ashish, I also have a tough time trying to garner traffic from social media sites, especially Twitter. Thanks Heather and Ted, for sharing your advice about it!
SEO is a fine way to promote yourself more, and I love the way you mentioned PPC.
If you know what you are doing with that, you can definitely succeed from that.
Blogging with a purpose can make your online presence be even more shining.
Thanks for your article, Heather.
Hi Heather,
Create relevant, targeted content daily. Post to your blog and articles based.
Speak to your target market with each post. Draw in steady, passive leads.
Combine with an aggressive social media campaign. Take time to build a large, responsive, rabid network.
Your friends will promote you to others, expanding your reach.
Emphasize sharing. Read blog posts. Create helpful, valuable comments. Post on blogs and relevant updates on social sites. Leveraging.
Engage with your friends. No better way to build a massive network. Do what successes do. Make your job easier. Promote others, some promote you, your online presence expands quickly.
Thanks!
RB
Online presence can only be made effective with using different social media sites.Getting referral traffic from these sites will build your reputation among the businesses related to your niche once you start socializing on sites like Facebook,twitter,StumbleUpon,Digg etc.
These tips are really of great help.
This is nice post about online presence I have working on my blogs and use facebook and twitter also we can get better traffic from social sites but for that I add one more thing that be careful when you are using social media some time its not worthy if you are not a good in regular postings as people like those who do not give time to there posts or updates.
Hi Mark, I totally agree. sometimes your fans or the people you are targeting just aren’t on a specific social platform. Always put your resources into places where people are for sure.
in this world online presence are very necessary for everyone specially companies has big investment and want to set in market very market.ppc is best way to boost your traffic fast.it takes some cost but works very well.when i do SEO with our work then it make me happy.
On line presence is a must these days, great tips here to make sure you achieve that. Do you happen to know if Pinterest is a good way to bring constant traffic in?
SEO is the way that increase the eficiency of your network but adding the PPC is other additional option to boost your services.it helps in big and as well as small level organisations.so i think this optional property is the nice thinking of you…………
Anshul, I totally agree that SEO is a huge factor these days for anyone that has an online presence. Mixing this up with PPC to increase visibility will help increase people coming through to your site for sure. Also with PPC you can cast a wider net out to people on the content and display network, where your SEO efforts wouldn’t be able to touch.
Good stuff. Those are easy to follow steps to a better online presence. I like the idea of local citations, I’ve been thinking a lot about different ways to boost blog traffic lately and that interests me.
I have great experience of using google places in my seo projects. It really works. Very fast index. There are few more concepts that have mentioned here & I need to practice. Anyway a great bunch of tips & thanks for sharing.