SEO

10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Small Business Website

Mary Kyamko — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 19:16:50 +0000

Will your business idea succeed? Take our quiz - completely confidential and free! Running a small business website is challenging. You must have a good design, create engaging content, optimize and maintain it, and more. But driving traffic is the most important aspect of your website’s success. It can be difficult, especially if you don’t have the budget to run large marketing campaigns. And it’s natural to expect a good return on investment from your website. After all, you have spent resources to establish it to make your business more successful. Thankfully, the web is a vast land of possibilities. If you know how to navigate it, create and find opportunities, and leverage available resources, you can drive organic traffic to your website. Over the past fifteen years, our team has helped thousands of entrepreneurs and small businesses build and optimize their small business websites. We’ve keynoted numerous conferences and webinars on optimization and frequently write and talk about optimization and conversion strategies on our blog and at conferences. This guide shares the actionable insights, tips, best practices, and expertise we’ve developed after helping over one hundred thousand brands. 1. Create quality content Offer more than just your products or services – invest in creating high-quality content that adds value to people’s lives. Engaging content helps you rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing. You don’t want to be just any other small business looking to make a sale. You need to give people another reason to keep returning to your website. One way is to offer resources that can educate, such as: Blogs Newsletters Webinars Case studies Quality images and engaging videos Whitepaper and more Providing engaging content also allows you to show off your expertise on subjects belonging to your niche. This can help you build credibility and foster long-term relationships with your audience. Essential Branding Toolkit for EntrepreneursBuild a stronger brand with our free guides. Get actionable insights to define your brand’s unique voice, understand your market, and stand out to customers. The guides are concise, actionable, practical, and tailored for the busy entrepreneur. The Ultimate Branding Checklist Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition Build Your Brand Pillars Worksheet Market Research Kit

Local SEO: The Definitive Small Business Guide [2024]

Mike Khorev — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 18:11:21 +0000

Your guide to local search engine optimization. Discover what local SEO is, how to optimize it, and help prospects find your business.

SEO for Nonprofits: 5 Effective Strategies for Nonprofit Websites

Anne Stefanyk — Fri, 20 May 2022 00:39:45 +0000

Tips and insights on SEO best practices for nonprofits. Learn how to get started, drive donations, and increase organizational awareness.

5 Proven SEO Tips That Will Improve Your Website

Katie Lundin — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 21:01:21 +0000

Keep these five insights in mind when designing your website and you could soon start seeing your site and content rank higher in the SERPs.

The Small Business Guide To SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Ross Kimbarovsky — Wed, 14 Dec 2016 16:42:41 +0000

Here are the top ten things you can do to make SEO an effective part of your marketing strategy:

10 Practical Small Business SEO and SEM Marketing Tips

Ross Kimbarovsky — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 07:31:26 +0000

crowdSPRING is a small company (our team is 10 people). For a small company, efforts spent on one marketing initiative typically detract from other marketing initiatives. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often ask us about how we market – and especially about SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (paid search). Here are our top ten suggestions, based on our own experience, for supercharging your SEO and SEM efforts: 1. Set Specific Goals. It’s important to establish specific goals to dominate with SEO and SEM. While ultimately, you are probably looking to make money, you’ll want to establish specific interim goals so that you can properly measure whether your efforts are worth the investment of time and money. Why This Is Important: If you don’t establish specific goals, you will not be able to evaluate the opportunity costs of your SEO and SEM efforts. For example, you might see more conversions (i.e. more traffic to your site), but you will have difficulty assessing whether you could have increased the traffic even more through other marketing efforts. You’ll also have difficulty scaling your efforts. Tips: Think about what needs to happen for your business to succeed. For example, if your revenue model is driven by advertising on your site, one interim goal could be to drive a certain amount of traffic to your site. If your revenue model is the sale of a service or product, your goal could be to get your cost per conversion below a certain amount after 90 days (i.e. make sure that you’re paying less for paid search than your profit on a transaction from a customer who visits your site via paid search and buys a product or service). 2. Define Conversions. A conversion is an action that a user performs on your website. For example, if you care most about registrations of new users, a user who registers on your site from an SEM or SEO lead will count as a conversion. If you care most about traffic to your site, then any user that comes to your site from an SEM or SEO link will count as a conversion. Why This Is Important: Conversion is important because you will want to know the cost to obtain each new conversion on your site. You’ll also typically want to keep the conversion cost below your profit from each transaction (unless the value of the customer to you over a period of time, is sufficiently high that you’re willing to pay MORE for the conversion cost than your profit for the initial transaction). Want a free brand review?Answer 5 short questions and we will send a custom report with actionable insights and specific actions you can take to build a stronger brand. We just emailed the info to you. Email Address Tips: Do your best to keep conversions tied to the same outcome for the various SEO and SEM campaigns you’ll undertake. It’s OK to have multiple desired outcomes – but it’s confusing if you keep changing between..

Ten Practical Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips

Ross Kimbarovsky — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 06:05:01 +0000

Mike and I stated working on crowdSPRING in the summer of 2006. We incorporated the company in May 2007 and launched the crowdSPRING marketplace in May 2008. We’ve learned many important lessons along the way. In some ways, our experience is typical of other start-ups. In other ways, it is not. I want to share some of our adventures (and mis-adventures) in the hope that it’ll help others looking to start a company or those who’ve already launched a start-up. So, from time to time, I’ll post a new tip, based on our experience with crowdSPRING over the past two years (and my experience advising technology start-ups over my 13 year career as an attorney). Follow me on Twitter for more tips. Start-up Tip 6: Ten Practical Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tips Given the huge amounts of money spent on SEM, it’s a sure bet that you are going to consider whether you should spend some of your valuable dollars on SEM as part of your overall marketing strategy. [NOTE: The suggestions in this post apply to both start-ups and to established companies looking to launch SEM campaigns]. SEM involves using search engines (such as Google) to promote your product or service. Billions of searches are performed every single month. When you start an SEM campaign, you decide how much you are willing to spend and the keywords that you want to bid on. You set your maximum budget (per day/per month) and if you happen to be among the highest bidders for a given keyword when search results are being delivered, your ad will be shown alongside search results (on the side or at the top, for example). SEM ads are circled in red in the following search on Google for “graphic design”. SEM is a simple idea and can be a powerful tool for many companies. It can also be costly and ineffective for other companies. While much has been written about SEM by many self-professed “experts”, it’s not easy to find useful tips for SEM campaign(s). And there’s also this – a huge amount of SEM content is not only bullshit – it’s wrong. I am not suggesting that you should become an expert in SEM or manage your own SEM campaigns. SEM can be complicated and it does require a great deal of attention. We’ve been using and recommend Keyword First if you want some expert help in this area. On the other hand, plenty of people self-manage successful SEM campaigns. Don’t be intimidated by all of the options and tools. If you decide to conquer SEM on your own, I want to share with you what we’ve learned about SEM over the past seven months. I am not an expert in this area. These are the things I would have wanted to know back in May 2008 when we launched crowdSPRING – and I hope that they help you to avoid some of the SEM mistakes we made along the way. So, here we go..