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Looking to jump start traffic to your small business website while your SEO kicks in? That’s what I’m going to talk about in today’s video blog.

Hi there internet fans. It’s Ryan Perry. And today, I want to talk about how to kickstart traffic to your website when you’re not ranking on the first page of Google. There are a number of key things that you can do in order to help you drive traffic and build SEO value and quality with Google in order to ensure that you do get ranking on the first page as quickly as possible. The very first thing you’ll want to do is citations. These are local search directories and the number one search directory that you want to be in is Google My Business. The reason why it’s important to be in Google My Business is that if you want to be found on Google, Google’s giving you a way to plug your information directly into its database. If you’re never in its database, you’re never going to be found and you will never be ranked.

Google My Business is the first place you want to start, set up an account, and make sure that you fill in all the information. Make sure the name, the address, the phone, this is called NAP, N-A-P, name, address, phone is correct. Hours of operations, description, upload images. Do your best. When you create shortcuts, essentially what you’re telling Google is that you may be a legitimate business, but we know that a lot of hackers and people that are trying to shortcut the system don’t put the effort in to fill out their information completely. As you’re filling out the information for your Google My Business account, make sure you keep that information in an document like a notepad or a Word file. That way, you can copy and paste that information into a couple of other directories that I’m going to talk about later.

Now that you manually set up and created a Google My Business account, there are three other accounts that I highly recommend that you manually create. One is going to be Bing Places for Business, Yelp, and if it’s relevant to your industry, a Tripadvisor account. I’ve highlighted some of the most important accounts that you want to manually create, that means you physically go in, create a username and password, fill out all the information. There are thousands of other search directories or citations as they’re called in the industry that you want to be included in. And in order to do that, I recommend logging into a national database, that’s a high-level database that will take your information and bring it down to all of the other search directories or citations. Some of those national directories would be Yext, BrightLocal or Whitespark.

You don’t need to be in all three because those are competitors. Choose one, you’ll find pricing’s different, feature’s going to be different. Find one that’s best suited for your company. Go ahead, fill out the information. And what they’ll do, again, is they’re going to take all of your information and bring it down to all of the other search directories. That part can be done manually. The key thing when doing all of this is that your information is consistent across the board. Some places where I find people have issues is doing certain things like do I spell out the word street or do I abbreviate it, S T. If you’re going to abbreviate S T, make sure you do that for all the directories. Although it sounds kind of silly because it’s, to the human brain, street and S T mean the same thing, we have to remember that computers are zeros and ones. Yes, they’re smart, but we want consistency. I should say Google wants consistency. Therefore, we want consistency in order to ensure that you are a legitimate business.

Once you have all the citations out of the way, one of the easiest ways to drive traffic to a new website that does not have any visibility on Google search is paid advertising. I know that could be a dirty word for a lot of small business owners, we don’t want to pay for anything, we’d love to get it for free. I mean, that’s why they invented the internet anyhow, isn’t it? So you can get everything for free? Well, not the case. Facebook has made it very simple to target specific clientele in a very targeted area. Maybe a city, a zip code. They’ve done a great job and you can actually boost a post on your business page for as little as $5. So totally recommend. If you don’t have a Facebook account, setting up a Facebook account, and while we’re talking about Facebook, you should also set up a Twitter account. These are very large social media channels that Google looks at and relies on for trying to determine if you’re a valid company or not.

Even if you don’t use Twitter, I always recommend to all of my clients, make sure you have a Twitter account. That way, not only do you have the fact that you have the account, that’s another citation, which is important for Google, but additionally, it’s another backlink to your website, which is also going to improve SEO. Regarding Facebook advertising, boosting a post is gonig to be one of the easiest ways. Take some time, review some videos, understand how to boost post effectively, get the most value out of your money, and spend as little as $5 a month, boosting one post a month. If you can do that once a week, that’s $20 a month. It’s going to be a very effective way for driving traffic to your website. And pro tip here, one of the things that Google looks for when determining ranking is how many people are visiting your website.

If Google indexes your website, they go through your website and they go, “Oh, nobody’s going to your website.” It’s not going to help your ranking. Running some paid advertising even at a limited dollar amount will help. The other forms of advertising that you could look into would be YouTube or Google pay-per-click. Typically, I steer people away from this unless they have a large budget and are willing to outsource it as the interface is quite difficult. It’s a very robust, a very powerful interface, but it has a very steep learning curve. So it’s not something I would mess with, instead, totally recommend sticking with Facebook boosted post.

There are number of traditional offline channels that you can use also. Print ad, radio, TV, depending on what your budget. A lot of people have found email marketing is a great way to grow and promote a website. Especially if it’s a new website and you have a large email list. Always want to promote your website through all of your marketing channels. May it be your business card, any brochures, postcards, any type of paper product that’s going to promote your business should always have your website on it and even your email signature when you send an e-mail out to somebody. You should have an email signature at the bottom that has a link to your website, so people can check you out.

Then if you really want to go old school, there is the old meet and greet. That is, go to chamber events, join a BNI, a Business Networking International Rotary group, any other type of non-profit organization. Let people know who you are, and what you’re doing, and share that business card with your website. These are all simple and easy ways to… By the way, if you found value in this video, please let me know by subscribing to this channel, so you can get more great information like this or simply leave a thumbs up or a thumbs down. All right everybody, take care.