Your website might look great but I’m sure you know by now that without visitors there wasn’t much use for designing it. Small businesses regularly face the challenge of building a website only to see it sit dormant with no fresh content or visitors. Without visitors you could have spent thousands of dollars just to put a website addresss (url) on your business card. Getting traffic from your local search engine requires a little help and some of these tips.

A website with good traffic from search engines offers free leads to potential customers that are actually looking for you. These are the kind of places you want to invest in – long term clients. With good traffic from local search engines like Google you can spend less money on advertising and more on new products to increase your sales.

The real question then is how do you get traffic to your businesses website?

One of the best ways to get started is Search Engine Optimization which is often known as SEO for short. This means you make changes to your website (mostly programming & code) so search engines will understand what your website is all about and rank it higher for relevant search terms.

What does this mean in real terms for your business?

Let’s consider an example for an “orthodontist” in “Las Vegas”. If I were told by my dentist that I needed braces and that I should find an orthodontist to put them in I would probably go to the internet and open up Google.com. I would then most likely search for (the place I lived) “Las Vegas Orthodontist“. The results would be a ranking of sites that the search engine Google would have decided were most relevant for my search terms (keywords) used.

If your orthodontist website appeared on the first page of Google’s results then you would get a free, very targeted visitor to your small business website.  From your website you would have just got more customers and bigger profits!

Here are few basic topics in regard to Local Search Engine Optimization

1. Do Your Keyword Research

It’s important to do thorough research before deciding what keywords (search terms) your website will focus on. The key is to see what people are searching for relating to your business in your local area. You’ll want to optimize your website for these keywords.

2. Select a Keyword Rich Domain Name

If possible, use your best keyword as your domain name (website address, ex. www.yourbusinesskeyword.com). In our example above, lasvegasorthodontist.net or .com would be an ideal domain name (web address/url) if that is what people search for. This may not always be possible if you already have a business website and/or someone else already owns this domain name.

3. Use Search Engine Friendly URLs that Include Your Keywords

As well as in your domain name itself, you should also use keywords (search terms) in the url (web address) for each page on your site. An example from our current case study is: http://www.lasvegasorthodontist.net/invisalignbraces. Of course it is important that the content you add to that page is relevant to your keyword too.

These 3 tips are just the very basics about using local search engine optimization for your small business. Whatever your needs are or the size of your business it’s important to get your website into the local search results. If you need more help with understanding how to do this or would like Journey Digital Media to do it for you: learn more about local seo or contact our seo experts.