As a business owner, you would like to see your website get as much relevant traffic as possible. Obtaining a flow of high quality traffic to your site can be a tedious and frustrating process. Search Engine Optimization or SEO at one time consisted of simply adding the right keywords to your pages. Over time, SEO has evolved far beyond that .

SEO / Social Networking components.

I use a multi step approach to gaining traffic tailored to your business.

Preliminaries

Before you spend money on SEO and Social Networking, I will work with you so that I fully understand your goals. I also want to determine  what kind of visitor will help you meet those goals.

We also need to look at your existing site. Some sites are built in ways that impede SEO. Other sites are based on outdated technology and vulnerable to hacking.  Some packaged web solutions are limited in their ability to be optimized.

Establish a Baseline

You cannot improve what you cannot measure accurately. If you have Google Analytics data I will analyze that to determine a baseline of visitors and if your visits are trending up or down. Analytics can also tell us a great deal about how visitors are finding your site and what they are doing when they get there. If you do not have Analytics installed, I will install it. The same is true of the Google and Bing search consoles. These provide important details as to how the search engines view your site.

The Search Consoles will also indicate if the search engines view your site as mobile friendly or not. Some older sites are not mobile friendly and this can cause a loss of ranking.

The analytics information is also extremely helpful in identifying analyzing visitor behavior such as abandoned shopping carts and bounced visits.

Migrate your site if necessary.

In some cases, it might be necessary to migrate your site to a new platform. For example, if we find that your site is based on Joomla 1.5, then we would need to migrate to either the latest version of Joomla or another platform such as WordPress or Drupal.

When setting up a new site to replace a site that has decent traffic it is imperative to make sure that none of the old traffic is lost when the new site becomes active.

Install tools to help with SEO.

There is an excellent plugin available  for WordPress that will help developers and site owners create content and sites that will get the most Search Engine visibility as possible.  Other tools provide easy ‘share’ buttons.

Coach the site owner in creating SEO Friendly content

SEO is not something that a consultant can magically ‘apply’ to a site. It is an ongoing process. The people responsible for adding and editing content need to understand how to create content that maximizes SEO potential.

Set up Social Media appropriate to your site and business.

In today’s world, a website does not stand alone. Links from Social Media are critical to growing traffic. However, not all social media applies to all business types. For example, a dating site would probably find very little benefit in posting to LinkedIn.

Once we determine which Social Media sites would be best, we will configure each site to your needs.

Automate Social Media Postings.

Posting to Social Media requires a fair amount of effort. However the rewards can be significant. One viral tweet could bring in as much business as you can handle. There are tools available that can help by automating a portion of the process of posting to Social Media.

There is some ‘low hanging fruit’ that business owners often miss such as claiming your business in Google and Facebook. Sites such as Google and Facebook create placeholder entries for businesses. They scrape information from a variety of sources to establish these listings. There is a means to allow the rightful business owner to ‘claim their listing’. To not do so is to leave money on the table.

Be wary of ads claiming that they will ‘drive thousands of visitors to your site’. In almost all cases they are using shady techniques that can get you banned from the search indexes. I can explain that in more detail.

Paid advertising

In some cases, SEO and Social Networking simply will not drive the desired level of traffic. In that case, a business owner may opt to use paid advertising such as Adwords, Facebook ads, Twitter promotions or similar methods.  I can help guide your through these tools.