Build It and They Will Come – Well Maybe

Many small business owners ask me “Do I have good website traffic?” “How does my site compare with others?” “How can I get my website to generate more business for me?”.

The reality is that a website with under 10 pages of content that promotes a service or consultant will typically receive anywhere from 10 to 30 unique visits a day. Based on what I have seen, this is about what you can expect in regards to traffic. So how do you get more and how do you get your website to start generating leads?

For small websites, this is my advice:

1. Get blogging now! A site your size, to become competitive, needs to grow, and needs to have a regular content addition program. Blogging is absolutely the easiest way to do this. If you don’t want to blog yourself, you can hire us to blog for you, we are experts at it.

2. Don’t waste your time and money right now on website optimization. Unless you are in a niche market or provide a desired but unique item or service that does not have much web competition, your website can simply not compete and place at that size organically on the search engines. That doesn’t mean that you should not be doing other things for organic placement, but I do not recommend hiring us or another firm for search engine optimization at this point in your growth.

3. Get going with Google AdWords. You can drive qualified targeted traffic to your website and really get good results with AdWords. I recommend a minimum budget of $500 for clicks for the first 30 days. Get a good account manager to set up your account so you hit the ground running. You will most likely also have to invest in account management fees and should most likely plan on purchasing time to create targeted website-matching landing pages for your ad groups for the very best results. We do this too, so make sure to check out our Google AdWords services before you ask anyone else to help you. We’ll take good care of you and be good stewards of your click budget.

4. Start getting links to build organic position and traffic over time with feature articles and white papers. Using article directory syndication sites, you can post a well written article with a link in your author bio back to your website. The more people who choose to pick up your article for their own use from the syndication site, the more links you’ll get back to your website helping your search engine placement. Make sure your articles appeal to a very wide range and do not just speak about your product. What you are really looking for is wide syndication and the link back to you so focus on business, real estate or health issues and articles for the widest distribution. We can write articles for you if you desire. You should review some that we have written recently as examples of how to appeal to a broad audience even if you are not going to use our services.

5. Do a press release once a month and generate links and traffic with your news spin. Another way to build buzz, but particularly how to build more traffic and more one way inbound links is by writing press releases and using PRWeb as your distribution vehicle. You’ll get great exposure and excellent staying power as sites pick up your news and links. I recommend the Search Engine Optimization level. Distribution at this level is $200 (plus you’ll pay about $175 for us to write your press release), but the exposure is excellent and much better than the cheapest level.

Even if you decide to do these items yourself or decide to hire another firm to do them for you, know that these five tips do work to help build your website, create your unique web authority, and help to improve your organic search placement.  The key to remember when it comes to a website is, just because you build it, does not mean that they will come to visit it. You need to be proactive and aggressive to build your authority and web visibility position to put your website to work for you as a lead generating machine.