Small Business Websites - How do you get more traffic to your site?

Interesting article in the SMH Enterprise section on improving the findability of your small business. Thought I would add a few points of my own. Some of the material in this post is fairly introductory (a lot of small businesses don't really have an understanding of how search engine rankings work, so I have included it for their benefit)

I have divided what you can do with Google into 'Ranking Improvements' vs 'Sponsored Ad Improvements' to differentiate between the types of work that you can do in these different areas to improve visibility in Search Engines.
Note: the work that you do in this area will also result in benefits in other search engines as well such as Yahoo! and Ninemsn etc.

1. Ranking Improvements

As the SMH article mentioned, a lot of small business websites focus mainly on visual appeal. As we have found on Rave About It, the easiest way to grow the number of visits to your site is through improving your visibility in search engines organically, rather than increasing the amount of sponsored advertising that you are doing.

Say your a small plumbing business and a potential customer does a search in Google using the term " *Surry Hills plumber ".
How high Google places the link to a random local plumber website in response to the above search term, would result largely on Google's calculated 'importance' of that website, relative to other websites.

So, the 4 most important considerations relating to the 'importance' of your site are:

a) The number of other websites that link to you (inbound links)
b) The number of individual pages that you have on your website
c) The relevancy of the content of your site (to a user search)
d) The number of reciprocal links that you have; e.g. say your website linked to Website B and Website B linked back to you.

Inbound links

The easiest way to set up more inbound links to your website is to list on all the major online business directories. In addition to our website, Rave About It, many online business directories offer free listings. Setting up a listing in each should take no more than 5 minutes per directory and will give you some inbound links in less than a week or so. To speed up the process of your listing being indexed by Google, you can add the links manually.
Some of the key business directories that offer free business listings are:

1.Dlook
2.Hotfrog
3.Aussieweb

and Google Maps Australia's Local Business Centre

Number of pages

Google prefers websites with more pages, however the reality is that the websites of the majority of small businesses are small ( the majority averaging less than 10 webpages).

As a small business owner, the chances are that you want to keep the website fairly simple ( and therefore easy to manage), therefore it is more beneficial to focus on less pages with more relevant content than vice versa (see point c.).

The relevancy of the content of your site (to a user search)

In place of extra pages, what you can do is to modify the existing content on the website to include popular keywords (as defined by Google) relating to your services. Christine Parfitt has a good article on how to select these keywords.

Reciprocal Links

Another way is to get an reciprocal link, is through listing your services on an Industry Association homepage, as these tend to have a high amount of 'authority' on the web. If you provided a link back to this Association on your website, this would constitute a reciprocal link ( which would benefit your ranking in Google). In NSW for example, the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) maintain a list of accredited businesses.

Prior to doing this, make sure that Google indexes the section ( you can do this by doing a a Google search for a business name that is already listed on the industry website). If their name appears in the Google Search, then the site has been indexed by Google)


2. Sponsored Ad Improvements

Google Adwords


Meg has written a good post on sponsored advertising here .Whilst Google is the most popular search tool from a user perspective, from an advertising point of view, it is extremely competitive. If you are not content with the results that AdWords are getting then, there are several other options, including Yahoo Search Marketing.

Personally, Rave About It, which is advertised on both Google and Yahoo, gets 5 times the response rate in Yahoo vs Google. One of the main reasons for this, we believe, is because we do not have to bid as high for popular keywords and therefore get higher placement for our dollar at the top of the screen.