The success of modern businesses is determined by how much quality traffic their websites get.
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Traffic is the lifeblood of any website. That being said, just any kind of traffic will not do because not all visitors bring the same value. The goal of any small business should be to draw quality traffic to their sites – visitors who will be most interested in buying what you have to sell.
The following guide is intended to help small business owners attract the right customers to their website for the most effective and organic lead generation.
Start with a quality product to begin with
The best marketing efforts in the world will not help your small business if it doesn’t have a great product it is offering to begin with.
This is why it’s exceedingly important to do market research and make an educated guess as to whether there is sufficient demand for your product to sustain your business before you even open your doors. You cannot sell a product if it doesn’t have some kind of value to your customer.
All business leaders need to consider what solutions their products or services provide to the customer and work to draw visitors to their site with that in mind. Also, consider the additional value the expertise and experience your team brings to customers who do business with you.
Develop buyer personas
At their most basic, buyer personas are concept profiles of your ideal customers.
Buyer personas need to be created from data you have gathered and analyzed via market research and impressions from existing customers.
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Once these personas have been created, your business can use them to make decisions regarding product development, crafting marketing plans, providing exceptional customer service and in which areas of your business operations you should focus your time and effort. Be sure to take into account what these buyer personas want and will get out of a relationship with your company.
There is also such a thing as negative buyer personas – these profiles detail what kind of customers you do not want. Creating negative buyer personas can be just as important because they help you prevent wasting time and resources pursuing the wrong leads.
Generate quality content for these personas
Once you have a strong idea of who your ideal customers are, you need to create content that will drive these people to your website.
Content marketing is one of the most effective and organic forms of marketing there is aside from word-of-mouth, as most business advice will tell you. Content marketing is often most utilized on your blog or social media feeds, but the static site content is important as well.
Your content is what ultimately improves click-through rates (CTR). You can improve your CTR by leveraging titles, tags and descriptions to appeal to the right visitors. Remember to focus on the problem your target customers will have that you can fix for them. Keep it short and simple and be uniform across all platforms and advertisements. Finally, try different approaches and see which ones work most effectively.
Place CTAs throughout your site
In marketing, CTA stands for “call to action.” It’s how you let your visitors know what the next step is.
Small business owners need to make it clear to site visitors what you want them to do, and these CTAs should be incredibly varied. For example, in one place you can request that site visitors sign up for your newsletter. A call to action like this is especially important because it allows you to stay in contact with potential customers down the road.
You can encourage visitors to fill out a form and contact you for more information. Finally, in a place such as a product page, you can encourage them to make a purchase. CTAs should not only be placed on your site but in your off-site advertising efforts as well. CTAs should be included at the end of most content you produce as well.
Leverage good SEO practices
SEO is far from dead. However, it does need to be used correctly in order to be effective.
This is why it is often advantageous for small businesses to use a professional copywriter at a digital marketing agency to produce their content. Search engine optimization is based around getting your site to show up in the search engines when people search for certain words or phrases. By controlling what words and phrases appear on your site and in the content you produce, you can narrow down who you are appealing to. This gives you more control over the quality of traffic directed to your website.
SEO isn’t just about keywords either. Links to authoritative sources in your own content, as well as links to your content from other sites, also improves your SEO rankings. Incorporate all aspects of good SEO practices into your marketing plan to drive interested visitors to your website. A good digital marketing agency can help if you are having trouble.
Advertise in the right places
External advertising certainly has its place when it comes to driving traffic to your website. You should not solely rely on it but it should be an important tool in your marketing plan.
Facebook is one of the best digital advertising platforms because of how specifically it allows your ads to be targeted to people with predetermined interests. Facebook is also a massively popular social media site and an economic juggernaut where most of your customers are spending their time.
Google Ads is a solid choice because of its integration with the most popular search engine in the world, helping feed traffic into your site. A final good place to advertise is on private sites such as forums or communities your target customers frequent. This can take some trial and error but mastering it will be of great benefit in the long run.
Keep them coming back
The final, and perhaps most crucial challenge, is to find ways to keep existing customers coming back.
You can do this in a number of ways, such as by offering free trials, discounts, free shipping and other enticing offers. Most importantly, continue to educate your customers by frequently posting content they want to read. This can consist of helpful guides, interesting information and other content your buyer personas want.
Don’t forget multimedia such as images and videos – customers love videos in particular and they can be a very powerful way to draw customers to your site. Incorporate videos into your other content for even better results.
Attracting the right customers to your website can be a challenge. There is no one way to do it effectively, nor is there a magic formula for success. However, there is generally-accepted business advice and techniques that can set you on the right track.
Focus on identifying your target customers by developing detailed buyer personas. Always strive for improvement in your products, your content marketing and your customer service and it will be easier to generate organic, quality leads to your website.
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This guest blog post was written by Eric Gordon. We hope you’ve found it interesting and informative. Sound off in the comment section!
Author Bio: Eric Gordon is an independent business development and marketing specialist for SMEs. He loves sharing his insights and experience to assist business owners in growing their revenues. You can find Eric on Twitter @ericdavidgordon
