Driving high-probability prospects to your company’s website doesn’t have to be expensive, provided you use these five tactics:
- Engage customers as often as possible: Social media sites, message boards and consumer info sites are great places to network with prospects on a regular basis. Responding to questions and providing valuable info promotes your brand, but it also offers an opportunity to provide a link to your company’s website. The more prospects value your expertise, the more likely they’ll be to trust your site (and do business with your company).
- Become an advocate for other industry sites: Use your company’s website, blog or social media feeds to promote to trumpet other industry sites, companies or blogs, then contact a representative from those sites via email to let them know you’ve mentioned them. It’s a great way to open a dialogue, and this way, you can pass along pertinent press releases, product info and company news that those sites will be much more likely to repost themselves.
- Submit your own posts to some of the most popular sites in your industry: This not only increases your online visibility, it bolsters your company’s credibility considerably. If you’ve got a certain area of expertise, contact the administrator for a popular industry blog or site and offer to write a “guest post” about a topic or hot button that interests that audience. In the post itself, be sure to include several embedded links to pages on your company’s website (embedded links in copy have been proven to increase web traffic as much as 93%).
- Maximize your use of valuable keywords: Use analytic tools and other online resources to determine what the most popular search terms in your industry are. Use those terms as often as possible in product descriptions, blog posts, landing pages and headings. StumbleUpon is particularly valuable in terms of identifying which keywords have the highest rating on search engines.
- Add a “search by keyword” function: The search function has been proven to significantly increase the amount of repeat traffic a site gets, as well as the amount of time an average visitor spends on the site. Ninety percent of marketers claim adding a “search” function increases online conversions, according to a recent eConsultancy study.
