If you’re serious about growing your local Virginia business, attracting potential customers to your website is absolutely critical. If you aren’t finding ways to reach consumers and successfully drawing them into your website, it won’t make matter in the slightest if you have the world’s best product or service because nobody will ever know about it.

People are constantly using Google and other search engines to search for answers to their problems and if your website isn’t properly optimized to promote how your business solves those problems then Google won’t have any idea and neither will your potential customers.

If you want to attract people to your website from across the great state commonwealth of Virginia, you need to tell them your story so well that Google wants to share it with the world and specifically, our fellow Old Dominion State residents.

Driving people to your website and improving search engine rankings isn’t about keyword stuffing or other obnoxious spam-centric tactics, it’s about telling Google the answer to one very important question:

Why should they care?

Google’s objective any time somebody performs a search is to provide the best possible answer with the least amount of confusion as quickly as possible.

The challenge for you as a business owner is convincing Google that your website provides the best answer and therefore should rank at the top of their list.

Keywords are a great way to convey to Google that you have what people need but you must be careful to do so in a way that is natural and focused on maximizing value for people searching for answers.

When it comes to keywords –
too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

Using keywords properly is the key to driving website traffic.

It wasn’t long ago that you could get away with cramming keywords into the end of your blog post or the footer of your website as an effective way to get your website to rank higher in Google’s search results. SEO “experts” would use all sorts of black hat tricks to get their websites to rank.

You can trick Google for short periods of time but don’t be tempted by the allure of quick wins. As we’ve seen time and time again, Google is a worthy and just master and punishes those who resort to trickery in an attempt gain an advantage.

If you have business competitors who are ranking ahead of you using questionable techniques in an attempt to trick Google, it will only be a matter of time until Google catches on and acts swiftly – severely penalizing search rank or even banishing them from search rankings entirely.

Keywords are only a small piece of the puzzle

Google has not only wised up to keyword stuffing and other similar techniques, they also realized another important concept.

If you’re producing great content, people will want to share it with others. Therefore, Google crawls the internet looking for other internet pages linking back to yours.

It’s an internet popularity contest and Google is the judge. It’s not enough to have a lot of small (unpopular) websites linking to your website, you need to be able to show a healthy mix of websites from niche domain sites to high domain authority ranking sites (i.e. the most trusted and popular websites as judged by Google) all linking back to your site.

The right way to attract visitors and connect with your audience

So now that you understand how important doing things the right way is, you’re probably wondering what is the right way?

There are many different things you need to do to effectively communicate to Google that you have exactly the right answer to your potential customer’s questions. However, our goal isn’t to overcomplicate things for you, it’s to simplify things for you enough that you can understand what it takes to grow your website traffic (if you need help with the expert-level mastery, that’s where we come in!).

What you should immediately focus on is finding a way to make people (and Google!) like you for you, not because you tricked them, and the way to do that is through high-quality, helpful content that is relevant to your audience’s interests and needs.

But this is where almost everybody goes wrong:

It’s about more than simply your potential customers. It’s about the people your potential customers are looking to for advice, the people they trust to provide helpful (and unbiased) advice.

Connecting with those influencers is absolutely essential to building an online profile that will convince Google you are an authority that can be trusted to provide the excellent answers their customers (searchers) are seeking.

You must tell a story so compelling that people are moved to share it with others through their own blogs, on social media, via website reviews, and anywhere else your digital footprint will be seen.

Winning on Google – How to Attract Quality, Local Traffic to your Business Website

Every business wants their customers to be happy and Google is no different.

For Google this means providing the timely and accurate content to every search query.

For you, this means if you’re not regularly producing high-quality, helpful content on a regular basis, your search ranking will suffer and your customers will not find you.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and inbound marketing is not a passive, set-it-and-forget-it strategy. You cannot simply design a great website and then stop producing great content and expect great results.

Designing a great website is essential as it will be your 24/7 sales tool, the race horse of your business. However, just as you must continue to feed your race horse for it to be healthy and produce peak results, so too must you regularly feed your website (in the form of great content creation).

Creating great content means producing content that is helpful, relevant, timely, and optimized. If you’re not producing this content on an every month basis then you’re simply not going to be effective when trying to attract visitors to your website.

Keys to Producing Local, Traffic-Driving Content:

  • Know your buyers, understand their problems, and what answers they need right now
  • Know what they’re searching for (i.e. if you are an inbound marketing agency, know that your customers are more likely to be searching for “how to get more customers” vs. “how to optimize a sales funnel”)
  • Provide excellent answers to their problems vs. cramming keywords into a blog post without providing any real value
  • Convert website visitors into loyal customers
  • Continually optimize, perform testing, and monitor analytics

Driving targeted traffic to your website is a challenge but is essential to growing your business. However, by regularly producing high-quality content optimized to provide an excellent experience for potential customers you can achieve the results you need on Google and the sales will follow.

Are you too busy to perform in-depth keyword research, develop sales funnels optimized to convert website visitors into loyal customers, and write compelling, traffic-driving content month after month?

 

We are Valley Inbound, Virginia’s local online marketing experts.

  • Our team consists of business consultants, data analysts, technical engineers, and expert storytellers located in the Staunton, Waynesboro, Augusta County area of the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.
  • We are passionate about helping small businesses across Virginia tell their story and solve their most challenging marketing problems.
  • We create compelling digital content for small businesses and non-profits that attracts, engages, and converts your website visitors into loyal customers.
  • We are dedicated to growing your website traffic, converting visitors into leads, and converting leads into your most devoted customers and champions for your business.

 

We look forward to telling your story.

 

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