3 Low-to-No Budget Ways To Boost Website Traffic for Small Businesses

02 Apr 3 Low-to-No Budget Ways To Boost Website Traffic for Small Businesses

So you’re a small start-up with low cash flow and you’re not sure how you can raise your online profile without launching a massive online campaign? Not all traffic boosting techniques require superhuman SEO skills or need to break the budget. But if you decide to go the low budget way you do require plenty of time on your hands and patience by the bucket-load. Still keen? Here’s just a few techniques that should get your site stats jumping.

1. Directories by the Dozen
You don’t need to engage in dodgy link swapping schemes with dubious websites to get your website’s URL in front of potential visitors; there are plenty of quality directories out there who will list your business for free in hopes that you will one day become a paying customer.
Do a quick online search pairing your product or profession’s name along with a keyword like directory (IE: real estate agent directory). Also try a similar search including area and/or country (IE: gold coast video production directory Australia). To find even more targeted results, try the whole exercise again incorporating words like free (IE: gold coast marketing services free directory). Sifting through the results you should find at least several national and local directories that will list your business for free, no strings attached. Usually these directories also offer premium paid listings with all the bells and whistles, but just stick with the basic free listing service (at least until you work out which ones generate the most interest in your site or prove to be the best potential fit for your product or brand).

2. Targeted Text
Is the text on your website optimized for search engines to organically help boost your rankings? Make sure that you have layered lots of keywords specific to your product or company – and remember these won’t always be the words you’d expect. To try work out the popular search terms you should layer through your text and tags, brainstorm a few keywords then enter them into an online Keyword Tool generator like the free one at Google:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Type in your keyword and it will show you a list of ideas sorted by how many searches are conducted using each set of related words. Once you’ve narrowed down a suitable list, focus on trying to include at least three of the terms on each page of your website – don’t forget to include them in title tags, alt tags and file names too. If you’re having trouble making it all gel into readable text, don’t be afraid to seek out the services of a copywriter experienced in this area; it’s often a lot cheaper than you think!

3. Integrate Your Offline Efforts
Depending on your product or profession’s target demographic, it may be wise to invest some time building an offline campaign to compliment your online one. This can take many forms, but some cost-effective ideas that will work for a broad range of businesses are competitions that direct contestants to your site for more details, gathering photos of customers and building an online gallery on your site that they must log on to view, or creating a customer loyalty scheme that offers monthly prizes with winners names available only online. Anything that offers an incentive big enough for people to go to the hassle of typing out your web address and finding your site will do – and don’t think you have to go all out and offer up some billion dollar luxury holiday. Research consistently shows people actually respond better to smaller prizes as they psychologically think they have a way better chance of winning. And don’t forget to plug your website in all your offline materials; this includes business cards, brochures, anywhere your name is mentioned! (Speaking of which, did I remember to plug our site www.soularchmedia.com yet??)

These three ideas should get you started, but there’s more where that came from. Stay tuned for the next instalment of our shoe-string budget tips for helping your business grow online!

Caz x
(Yep, you guessed it, coming at you live from www.soularchmedia.com!)