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?
Every one want to boost their online presence but people are confused how to do that. So for the confused people here are some great tips which can help them.In the above tips i find Claiming the social profile of a brand will surely help to boost our online presence.
one could connect with social media to increase his/her social presence. now days there are many social sites with a buzz of traffic and they can be easily connect with you. Mixing seo with is also a very nice trick to increase social presence.
Ravi, yes I totally agree. A lot of people recommend mixing both. It really is up to the vertical you are in. Sometimes social media just doesn’t work in some niches. Always good to test a few channels and calling it quits if there is no added value.
Avoid thinking of blogging as a simple thing. You should always be researching, learning and generally approaching your blog as a business. Use seasoned bloggers as a good example to follow, and apply what you learn to your own techniques in a constantly evolving process. Your readers will no doubt appreciate the extra effort you put into creating an efficient blog.
Hey David, you are totally right. Using seasoned bloggers to follow is a great example to follow, as it will give you a higher standard and the motivation to keep publishing.
Great tips! I really need to start following the last one more and mix some ppc in with the seo. I have an adwords credit that’s burning a hole in my pocket!
Establishing social media accounts for your online presence is becoming important for SEO purposes as well. Improving your online clout is becoming a much more holistic process, and you can no longer be lacking in any of these areas. You have to be an active participant in the online, social aspect of the internet to best create a strong presence.
Google places is a great idea to use, I hadn’t thought about that! Thanks for the tip. These are basic ideas you’re throwing out, but they’re definitely vital to increasing an online presence.
I will surely forward these insightful tips to my boss who is trying to boost his online presence. Poor thing-he is still to be indexed by the search engines. So we are reading as much as possible on the topic. Thanks for the share.
I have to agree with this, the social networking idea is great! Although it is hard to start, it seems that facebook and twitter are large platforms to boost online presence and it has worked, although it did quite a while to promote.
Heather,
I am guessing that a parking citation was not what you were referring to when you suggested that I get local citations.
Seriously, I did something I should’ve done long ago. I got my gmail account. Now, on to Google Locations for a bit of free local publicity. Great tip, thanks!
One can never get too much publicity…unless it is bad publicity!
I have a business located in India which serves people in US, UK and Australia, I want to promote that business on internet, in this case, How can I be use Google Places?
Or there is something I can do to for its promotion from India