Need traffic? Here’s what you need to do…

One of the greatest challenges for your small business is attracting traffic to your website. All of your SEO efforts have been put into place as best that they can be for the present time. Your SEO marketing strategies, of course, must remain fluid and poised to shift as the need to adapt to new protocols arise.

•  Driving traffic, however, is a plan that you can immediately put into effect without spending much additional marketing budget money. Before you try and generate that traffic, however, you need to get out and run your site through some tests to ensure that it is ready. Your testing strategy needs to focus on your sales copy; especially at your landing pages. Also, can your customers order simply and quickly? Is it easy to navigate around? Can they opt in for emails or a newsletter or special discounts?
• The next SEO strategy to use in driving some immediate traffic is to put together a pay per click (PPC) campaign. A focused PPC drive can boost your traffic in a very short time. Google, of course, has a PPC platform but so does Yahoo. With Yahoo, you are, also, aligned with many other smaller search engines so that you can actually reach around 80% of everyone that is out on the Web. Take the time to research the keywords you are going to bid on. Broaden your scope to include long tail keyword phrases. Just don’t bid on “books”. Bid on “home improvement books”. It will focus more on searcher intent and allow you to save some money as fewer are likely to bid on a longer tail phrase.
• Again, your traffic and SEO marketing strategy will be focused on content. If you can provide some free and valuable information and distribute it properly, you will be shocked at the traffic numbers you are likely to produce. At the end of your article, be certain to have a short bio of you and your company as well as a direct link to your site. This is valuable and useful information you are imparting, not a commercial.
• Build links and start an affiliate marketing program. Track down what sites are coming up on the first page of a SERP with regard to your keywords and go and visit them. The quality of your links is critical to your overall successful SEO marketing strategy. The search engine gods no longer consider quantity without quality. Approach those sites and convince them it would be in their best interest to link to you. Some wheeling and dealing will likely be involved.
• Finally, start an affiliate marketing program. It is relatively simple to do and you can instantly have a small tile ad on hundreds, if not thousands, of websites that are related to what you sell. Your affiliate members, of course, receive a commission on sales generated from their sites. These strategies can have an immediate impact on your SEO marketing strategy as well as on your traffic.

-Written by Kevin Sawyer