The lifeblood of any good website is website traffic. To survive, small businesses require new leads and customers to frequent their business. Whether you run an e-commerce store or a brick-and-mortar location, attracting new visitors is crucial to your business’ success. 

Your business website serves as an online storefront where visitors can learn more about your products and services, gain trust in your brand, and eventually convert into leads and customers. However, having a beautiful, easy-to-navigate website won’t help you attract more customers if no one can find it in the first place. Many businesses find it difficult to come up with new and creative ways to consistently boost website traffic. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about how to get more visitors (some of which are downright harmful to your business), which can lead to you repeating the same old strategies and achieving disappointing results.

Here are 10 tried-and-true methods to increase website traffic for your small business website, both organically and through paid advertising.

Add your business to Local Listings

You’ve probably noticed that business listings are available on a variety of platforms. Let’s take a look at a few of the most popular websites and discuss why they’re important.

• Google My Business: Google is the most popular search engine on the planet, with over 88 percent of the global search market. This is the most critical local business listing to start with as it’ll cover the vast majority of your target audience.
• Bing Places: Even though Bing only accounts for about 6% of the global search market, it may be worthwhile to create a business listing there. After all, that’s still 6% of the billions of searches every year (and remember it’s free to set up, so it really just costs a few minutes of your time).

Use B2B Networking Sites 

Nextdoor and Alignable are both social media marketing platforms that focus on connecting local businesses with local consumers and can assist small business owners in gaining visibility, increasing brand awareness, and attracting a steady stream of customers or partners.

So, which B2B Networking website is more effective?

Nextdoor calls itself “the neighborhood network.” The website says neighbors can use Nextdoor to “receive trusted information, give and get help, and build real-world connections with those nearby.” It promotes more caring and supportive communities by branding itself as a kind and neighborly network that brings people together.

Alignable, on the other hand, is focused on business-to-business (B2B) relationships. “The Small Business Referral Network” is its tagline. It enables business owners to connect with one another, ask and answer business-related questions, make and receive referrals, find leads and prospects, and boost their company’s visibility.

Market yourself on Social Media

If your small business isn’t on social media, you could be missing out on valuable opportunities such as new customers, brand insights, and audience and engagement opportunities with both customers and competitors. 

• Facebook: Every company that sells Business to Consumer (B2C) should set up a Facebook page since your customer will surely be a Facebook user.
• Instagram: Instagram is a visual platform that focuses solely on the photo and video posts, so it’s ideal for companies with a lot of visual content to share.
• Twitter: Twitter has a well-engaged audience for Tech-focused products, but we find that most small businesses get lost in the “noisiness” of Twitter’s constant 24/7 news feed.
• Pinterest: Pinterest is a purely visual platform because every pin includes an image or video. Users can save and display content by “pinning” digital bulletin boards that can be organized by category on this visually oriented platform. Fantastic for businesses that offer a visual product or service such as home decor, food, fashion, and more.

Use Your Personal Social Media Profiles for Business

Yes, company profiles and pages are still valuable. However, if people used their personal social media networks to build relationships with key contacts, it could be extremely beneficial to their careers and businesses.

This works because people prefer to do business with people rather than companies. You can strengthen your connections with your contacts by using your personal social media profiles which show off your personality.

Here are some tips on how to start using your personal social media accounts for business:

• Make contact with your network. Start using social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to connect with current or past coworkers, vendors, and industry contacts.
• Inform others about professional developments. Have you received an award or has your company made the news, share it to your personal profiles too.
• Share content that you find interesting. Sharing professional content on your personal social media can be beneficial. You want your contacts to know you’re the person to “go-to” if they need your area of expertise. 
• Link to your website. Make sure to add to your work history on your personal Facebook and Linkedin that you now work at your own business. This will allow your profile to also act as a link back to your business’ website. 

Create a professional email signature

An email signature is a great way to show your readers how professional you are while also providing them with the information they need to contact you or explore your website. Each email you send will have a signature at the bottom, which can help make a more personal connection with your email recipients on a traditionally impersonal medium.

Hubspot offers a free online email signature generator that makes it easy to create personalized email signatures that match your brand. You don’t need to be an expert in anything and you can get branded email signatures for Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Office 365.

What are the key components of a professional email signature?

By looking at your email signature, recipients should know:

• Who you are (name, job title, pronouns, headshot image)
• Where you work (company name, logo, address)
• Your contact details (phone number, email, social profiles)
• Website URL

Tip: Remember to keep the above information clear and concise. Including more than two phone numbers in an email could cause confusion for the recipient. 

Business cards

Business cards are physical cards that contain information about a company or a person’s business. A business card usually includes the giver’s name, company name (usually with a logo), and contact information like street address, phone number, e-mail address, and website.

Canva is a great place to design business cards, and it’s free. Custom business cards can be ordered and purchased through the same website. Their simple-to-use design tool allows you to create your own business cards from scratch. Make sure to add the relevant contact details while still making your card look stylish. Don’t forget to put your website URL prominently on the card to earn yourself some extra website visits. 

Paid Digital Marketing – Facebook Ads & Google Ads

Paid Search on Google

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is the largest and most popular pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform in the world. It has become synonymous with the term “paid search” due to its widespread use. With Google searches accounting for 91% of all internet searches globally, you can be sure that your ads will be getting seen.  

Paid Social Media on Facebook

Facebook Ads are an excellent example of “paid social,” or the practice of placing advertisements on social media sites. Approximately 2.91 billion people use Facebook every month, making it the most popular social network in the world.

Facebook ads are widely known for being rather inexpensive when compared to Google ads and also quite effective when promoting a product or service that has a visual aspect. With Facebook ads, businesses can use images, videos, or a combination of the two to showcase their products to potential buyers. This visual media makes for a more engaging ad, which could lead to higher engagement, click-throughs, and ultimately purchases if you strike the right audience.

For paid Facebook ads, the average conversion rate is 9.21 percent, according to Wordstream’s benchmarks. A “good” Facebook ad conversion rate should be around 10% or more, according to this conclusion. A Facebook ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) survey by Databox revealed that: About 30% of marketers see a 6-10x average return on ad spend.

Free Promotional threads

Reddit

Reddit is a massive discussion forum with subreddits (niche groups based around a certain topic) dedicated to just about everything. Users on Reddit have a reputation for being irritated by self-promotional posts, so make sure you’re being genuine and providing real value to members of the group in any posts you make there.

A few business-focused subreddits to check out, include;

• https://www.reddit.com/r/SmallBusiness/ 
• https://www.reddit.com/r/ContentMarketing/ 
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketing/ 
• https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/sweatystartup/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/

At the time of writing this, the /r/SmallBusiness/ subreddit has a Promote Your Small Business thread that gets posted every Sunday night, where business owners can share their business offerings and solicit feedback or help from other members of the community. 

Another opportunity for self-promotion is on /r/startups/ Share Your Startup thread on the 1st of every month, where entrepreneurs delving into the startup world get to share their stories, offering and solicit feedback from this community of creative, tech-enabled entrepreneurs.

In addition to increasing traffic to your website, having a presence on Reddit has other advantages to offer. Reddit, Quora, and Facebook groups have been used by blog writers to source “expert” information from members, so you may even find yourself getting some free publicity.

Email newsletter

Many brands and blogs use an email newsletter with a roundup of recent blog posts to promote a single post or even a series of blog posts. If you have an email list ready to go, start sending some updates (even infrequently) about your business, how it’s evolving, or even just some things you’ve accomplished or are struggling with professionally. This genuine form of personal communication can be a big traffic driver for small businesses. When we share our vulnerabilities and stories with other human beings, they start to form a bond with us. In business, we want to formalize those strong bonds into personal connections and relationships where these email recipients can become advocates of you and the brand you’re building.

With each newsletter email, try to encourage visits to your website by adding a link or Call-To-Action in your email. Attempt to offer a call-to-action that’s relevant to the story you’ve just shared in your email. Create an offer, a chance to win something, or simply a place where users can read more about the story or content you’ve just shared with them. This tactic is a popular one to generate more traffic to your website from email.

Bonus: Get Family & Friends Involved

When a customer’s interest in a product or service is reflected in their daily conversation, it is called word-of-mouth marketing (WOM marketing). Basically, it’s free advertising triggered by customer experiences that go above and beyond the consumer’s original expectations.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOM) is an effective and inexpensive way to advertise, attract and win over customers. When others talk positively about your business it builds name recognition and trust that leads to sales. 

WOM marketing occurs when customers spread the word about a company’s product or service to their friends, family, and other people with whom they have a close connection. Who else do we trust more than our own friends and family, right?

Friends and family can talk you up a lot, so make sure they know the right things to say. Make sure your posse knows about the types of customers you’re looking for and the services that you offer. Also crucial to the process is for your squad to tell the interested party how to contact you, so make sure to give your friends and family permission to give out your phone number, email, website URL, or business card. People love to help others, and if it comes up naturally in conversation, then your friends and family should be armed with the information necessary to turn that prospect into a lead.

Need A Little Help Implementing These?

Have no fear, you’ve come to the right place. Opasite works with a wide variety of small businesses that want to improve their online presence. Our experienced team of designers, writers, and SEO experts can help make your website look sharp, but we also have many other services that function as an extension of your website or lead traffic back to your website. 

Our core business is to create service-based small business websites that look beautiful while also generating new leads for your brand.. We handle all of the design, content creation, SEO, and ongoing website maintenance for you, without charging thousands of dollars like the other guys.

We believe in a creative approach where we get to know your business and take the time to understand what makes you unique. We then use this knowledge to create a website and holistic online presence that gets you noticed by prospective customers. Let us help you expand your online presence and increase your website traffic for your small business today!