How to Increase Traffic to Your Website

One of the most difficult hurdles for a small business or startup is building brand recognition. In order for your business to succeed, consumers need to know who you are, what you do and what makes you different from other businesses in your industry. The best way to do that is through your website.

But how do you get people to visit or even find your website in the first place?

Without the big budgets of larger, more established companies, or Don Draper and the Mad Men, small business entrepreneurs can feel at a disadvantage when competing for web traffic.

While you may feel the odds are stacked against you, small-to-medium businesses can etch their name in the market without spending tons of money on advertising.

Here are five budget friendly strategies that will increase website traffic and help you steal a slice of the market.

Blog, Frequently.

A blog may not seem like a vital element to a businesses' website, but it's a key tool in driving Internet traffic.

Business site Entrepreneur ran a case study where they increased their blog posts from two per week to over 10 posts every week. In just two months of consistent blog postings, they saw a 300% increase to site traffic.

This wasn't a lucky occurrence; blogs serve multiple purposes in driving website traffic. It's an area of your site that you can constantly add SEO-optimized content as well as updating content with regularity. Updating your site with fresh content will ensure you won't lose ground in Google search results. By ignoring the need for fresh, updated content on your website, you risk falling out of favour once your material goes stale.

From a user engagement stand point, blogs will create loyal readers and make a personal connection with consumers. Your followers will want to come back to your website, without you having to pay to advertise to them.

Remember to promote your blogs on social media!

Don't Forget About Google+.

Facebook and Twitter get all the social media fanfare they're the most well known by the average online user, so businesses naturally gravitate towards the two platforms.

Google+ didn't become quite the Facebook competitor some thought it might emerge as, but don't underestimate this misunderstood social platform. The objective advantage that Google+ has over Facebook and Twitter is when you share content on your Google+ profile, your network can see it every time they search Google. That's a huge competitive benefit over Facebook and Twitter posts, which will only be seen by people in your network while specifically surfing those two mediums.

Google's own research (we'll assume there's no bias here) found users are fixated on social annotations over other page elements like videos or rich snippets. You can take advantage of this by regularly posting and updating content on your Google+ page, like your consistently updated blog (hint hint). This article by Rand Fishkin from Moz.com details how you can utilize Google+ to appear in the top results. 

Content you post on Google+ will rank in regular search result pages as well, visible to everyone on the web, regardless if they're a part of your network or not.

Get Rid of Duplicated Content.

Duplicated content, which is content that appears on more than one page on your site, will deter internet traffic away from your website. This includes content that's identical, or even stuff that's similar enough to other content.

When Google recognizes duplicated content, your website will be penalized, losing points with the search engine and thereby reducing the likelihood of favourable rankings and increased web traffic.

Google's Search Console has resources to identify duplicated content on your website, so you can fix any problems ASAP.

Optimize Video On your Website.

Videos are excellent to incorporate on your website as the old adage goes, 'show, don't tell'. Adding video to your site is not only a great way to show off what your business does, but you can artfully use it to increase website traffic.

In comparison to other types of rich snippets, video snippets claim a hearty chunk of search real estate. Optimizing video on your website will drive web traffic thanks to our tendency to notice videos on search pages first. This can be done by creating a video XML sitemap, which many third party services can easily do for you. Include relevant target keywords to the video title, tags, and video description, as well as a call-to-action in your video too.

Like SEO-optimized written content, optimizing video will show favourably on search result pages, with the snippet playing a subtle yet strong role in driving Internet traffic.

Add a Sitemap to Index Relevant Pages.

Google's Search Console allows you to submit URLs from your website to Google's index. This is a tool to make Google aware you have dynamically generated URLs and pages, and that they're available for web crawling. This allows your pages to be included in PageRank, showing up to all that sweet, sweet Internet traffic through Google.

Remember, this isn't a guarantee your web pages on your sitemap will be included in search indexes; a sitemap simply helps search engines use the data to learn about your site's structure for more optimal crawling. To increase website traffic, the goal is to compliment your sitemap with compelling content.

These approaches are a great start for small or medium-sized businesses and startups to carve a space into their respective markets by driving website traffic. They don't cost much, and will build the foundation of your following when you're starting from scratch.

Looking to improve web traffic with even more tricks? Bloomtools offers your business or startup all the tools you'll need to start driving website traffic and ranking on search engines, like Google.  Find a Bloomtools consultant today to learn more about driving traffic to your corporate website and build engagement with leads.