The big day has arrived and you managed to create a website for your business.
Everything looks perfect. The site is mobile-friendly, it is fast, and provides a good user experience.
Now what? How can you get traffic to your site?
You probably want people to know about your site, so you can promote your business and acquire new clients. After all, that’s the goal. You need people to land on your site and call you or submit a form.
Here are some things that you can do yourself in order to get traffic.
Write content about the topics and the services that you are offering. (I want to help SMB businesses and that’s what I am writing this article. I want to show you what can you do to get more traffic) .
What kind of content?
The content that you like and at the same time that content that is related to the services that you provide.
Ok, I wrote the content, now what?
First, make sure the content that you wrote has value, it provides valuable actionable information to your audience.
Then make sure that the content is optimized for specific keywords that you want to target. Specific keywords that are related to your service.
Next, post your content on all the social media that you own. I suggest you use a tool like publer.io or any other tool that helps you do the same. Publer.io is free to use up to 5 channels.
At the same time, you can ask other websites, or blogs to post your content to their site and link to your original content. A good strategy is also to create a Google My Business account and declare your business to Google.
By the way, if you can get reviews on your Google My Business, that would be great!
Every time that you have a new piece of content publish it on your site and on all your social media accounts.
The above process is called SEO, search engine optimization. You write content, make sure it provides valuable information, optimize it for a specific keyword related to your services and ask other people to link to your content.
This is great, does this mean next week I will have a ton of visits?
It doesn’t work like that, SEO takes time. Essentially you are building your online presence and writing about why and how you can be valuable to someone. In addition, there are other things that you need to do:
Technical SEO, On-page SEO, User Experience Optimization, Link Building, and more.
But it is important that you take your first step. So go ahead and express yourself!
Ok but I don’t really want to wait. How can I make my phone ring today?
If you don’t want to wait and you need to generate leads ASAP, then paid to advertise is your best friend.
These are some of the channels that you can use:
- Google Search Ads
- Google Display Ads
- Facebook Ads
- Instagram Ads
- Google Guarantee (for some home service-based businesses, you can learn more about it here)
Google Ads is one of the best channels to use in order to advertise your services. You pay only when people actually click on your ads, doesn’t matter how many times they saw your ads!
How do google ads work?
Essentially you go to Google, hey google if someone is searching for keywords related to the services that I provide, I want to show them an ad. So you need to choose what keywords make sense for your business, created ads, and pay google to show these ads.
Oh wow, this is so easy…
Well not exactly, you need to make sure you set up the right structure, the right keyword match type, the right ad groups, the proper ad copies, a good landing page, the right bidding strategy, the right audience, etc..
So it’s a bit complicated for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience.
Ok, is there a way that I just pay google and people call me when they are looking for the services that I provide? I don’t want to do all these complicated things…
Yes, there is. It is the Google Guarantee Program. Visit this page to learn more about it: https://digitaltrek.ca/google-local-services-ads/
Ok, I got the above. You mentioned something about Facebook and Instagram, what about these channels?
Facebook and Instagram (they are actually under the same platform, Facebook) are a great way to showcase your work to your potential audience.
Organically it takes a long time to build an audience, but if you are willing to pay you can advertise easily on this platform.
The key is to find the right audience for the services that you are offering. Analyze the traffic, analyze your paid campaigns and make all the necessary adjustments.
The key on social media is the cliche expression, know your audience! It is cliche but it is also true. For small campaigns with a limited budget, you can experiment yourself a bit. I propose you use the BELT method.
Essentially you create different campaigns with different campaign goals. Each campaign target a specific part of the customer journey.
Top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of the funnel.
This post is a simplistic explanation of the different channels that you can use to promote your business.
If you are willing to scale and have a decent budget, I recommend hiring a specialist.
By hiring a specialist you are saving money and not the opposite!
By the way, all the above doesn’t matter if you are not able to track your leads and to see which channels bring you the highest number of leads!
Web analytics is the core of anything you do in the digital world!
Start by installing google analytics and creating goals for the specific marketing objectives!
If you need help, you can always contact me I am more than happy to provide a free site audit and SEO audit!