Small Business - Tips to Get Online and Get Traffic

I have always maintained that the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful one is that the former tries to constantly evolve and experiment, while the latter tends to stagnate and revert to old ways. This is especially true about marketing, where you need to constantly innovate and take advantage of the latest marketing methods to yield sold results.

The internet is increasingly replacing local directories and Yellow Pages as the de-facto way to find local businesses. Internet use is especially common among the educated, urban, 18-35 audience which every business tries to attract. Therefore, getting your site ranked high on Google for your main keyword is crucial to getting traffic to your site, which, hopefully, you can covert into customers.

Let's start off with the site itself. Don't let anybody tell you that you need the fanciest graphics, the latest fonts, and drop dead gorgeous flash designs to lure in visitors. In fact, overloading your page with heavy graphics is a great way to actually turn away visitors from your site. Your site should be easy to use (i.e. it adheres to the most common usability practices), clean, and quick to load. It should also be informative and should ideally include all the information a visitor might need to know. A brief history of your business, business hours, your services and offerings, a contact form, a FAQ section - these are essential elements in the website.

But getting the website made is the easy part. The hard part is promoting it. You need to pick a main keyword for your site and focus all your marketing efforts on ranking high for that keyword. Suppose you are a plumber in Atlanta. Then the keyword you should ideally target is "Atlanta plumber" or "plumber in Atlanta". When picking keywords, make sure that you pick something that has a decent number of searches per month, but less competition (i.e. number of competing pages in Google).

Your next job is to drive traffic to your site. You can do this via a variety of ways that would change depending on your budget. If you want quick results and can spare some extra cash, PPC is a great way to drive traffic. If you want traffic through Google and other search engines, you should focus your energies on SEO. Other methods you can employ are PPV (Pay Per View), Facebook ads, Twitter, etc. Covering all these methods is beyond the scope of this article, but there are plenty of resources online where you can learn more about them.