5 Steps To Quickly Improve Online Visibility

Blue Traffic will be participating in a free Lunch and Learn today at the Urbandale Chamber of Commerce. The topic is Internet Marketing and specifically, how local companies can drive more traffic, leads and customers to their website. Pat Pithan from Imaging Technologies is sponsoring the event and I want to thank him for including us.

I will only have about 45 minutes to speak, so I put together this one-page guide to help attendees get started. In case you weren’t able to attend, here are my notes.

1.         Start by learning how your potential customers are searching for you

• Review your web stats – Google Analytics is free at http://www.google.com/analytics/
• Brainstorm keywords/phrases. Use free version of Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find even more.

2.         Look for ways to work your keyword phrases into your website

• Every web page has a unique title…aka the “Title Tag” Start there.
• Search engines are looking for content (not graphics or images of words). Make sure you are using your keywords (naturally) within your content.
• The majority of your content needs to be original…not copied from other websites.
• Use keywords in your URLs when creating new pages.
• If most of your business is local, include your city and state in content.

3.         Promote your website with social media

• Use Twitter to begin a 2 way communication with others.
• Create a Facebook fan page and update it regularly.
• Create and update your LinkedIn profile.
• Link back to your website whenever possible. Links are important for rankings.

4.         Open Google Places acct: www.google.com/local/add/businessCenter

• Local search is growing 3 times faster than other searches.
• 97% of customers search for local products online.
• Local/Map results often appear above organic listings.

5.         Start a Google Adwords campaign at https://adwords.google.com/

• Choose keywords, set a budget, create your text ad(s).
• Only pay when people click on your text ad and come to your website.
• This is the fastest way to get on the first page of Google and it can start driving traffic to your website within hours.

Internet marketing is all about finding ways to get more traffic to your website.

The real goal is to find ways to attract the right audience…people who need/want what you offer.

Driving targeted traffic to your website will result in more leads, sales, memberships, sign-ups, etc. – but you need to make sure your website is user friendly and make it easy for visitors to contact you.

Update (11/8/2010): For anyone who missed our presentation last month, we will be doing a similar one on Monday, November 8th in conjunction with the Urbandale Jaycees (www.urbandalejaycees.org). This time our focus with be on web advertising and marketing. What is it, why do you need it and how does it work? During this meeting we will touch on the main pitfalls of SEO and PPC to help you can decide if this is something you can tackle in-house or if you should hire a specialist.