10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site

What good is all the time and energy you put into developing your Web site if none of your customers (or potential customers) are visiting it? Here’s what the experts say about getting some traffic to your plumbing Web site.

1. Know your customers. “Really the first thing you want to do is find who your audience is,” says David Pappas, Web marketing manager for Next Web Interactive in Thousand Oaks, CA. “If your bread and butter comes from a local market, then you need your website to disregard the whole globality of things and try to target folks in your geographical area.”

2. Yellow pages. “There’s a very large number of people--especially in the 40 and over crowd--that are still using the yellow pages that also have Internet,” says Nicholas Mistry, a software and Web hosting entrepreneur with offices in Boston, San Antonio, and India. “They’ll go to the yellow pages [online or the hard copy] to get the initial lead and then they’ll follow up and go to your Web site.”

3. Free search engine local listing. Thanks to a new Web-based mapping tool, search engines like Google and Yahoo allow users to find businesses based on zip code look-up. And it’s free. Creating an account with Google and Yahoo, will give you access to the local listings application. “You can list your business name, your phone number, a brief description,” Pappas says. “If you have a Web site, you can have a link to it and anyone who types in a zip code and the word plumber, they’ll get a list on the left and they’ll geographically see by tear drop who’s there.”

4. Paid online ads. Search engines like Google allow you to purchase ad words on a pay-per-click basis. “You pay when people click on your ad,” Mistry says. “Basically, you pick a keyword, how much you want to spend on that, and as people click on it you get charged.”

“The competition for keywords in the local market is much lower, so your cost-per-click will be much lower,” Pappas adds. “If you set an ad and you select a set of keywords, you’d probably create 10 different ads.”

5. Tweak your ads. “The beautiful thing about Google is that you can monitor your traffic and determine which ads are doing the best job,” Pappas says. “It will automatically optimize your ads, but you can go further and remove those ads if they’re just poor performers.”

6. Search engine optimization. For search engines like Google to find you through “organic search” (i.e. not paid ads), the content, organization, and links on your Web site are all crucial to getting seen. “You need to make your Web site with whatever magic Google needs to get it up,” Mistry says. “They have a formula that goes through all the pages and calculates what your position should be.”

7. Links. Getting relevant local Web sites to link to you gets people to your Web site and increases your position in organic search. “Folks that do come from those links are highly qualified,” Pappas says. “They are geographically fixed in your area [and] there is some value to a note of referral from a person who feels part of your community. One of the interesting things, however, is that the most valuable links to your site if you are a plumber would be links from sites that talk about plumbing. And in most cases, that might be your competitors. So what you may wish to do is find a handful of local businesses who sell products in your category.”

8. Post on message boards. “Lots of towns have Web sites, forums,” Mistry says. “You go in, talk to people. Don’t go in pitching your wares; you go in as an expert and start answering questions.” Every post should have a sign-off with your business contact info, including your Web site—to increase awareness and links for organic search.

9. Portals. Local and trade-specific consumer-to-business portals like Yelp, Craigslist, Angie’s List, and Service Magic are a must for making sure you’re seen because consumers will go looking for you there. “It’s free, it’s good and it’s focused,” Mistry says, and because those sites rely heavily on user-generated reviews, your listing will be accompanied by strong testimonials—assuming your customers like you!

10. Have a good Web site. “One of the last things I do before I buy a product at retail if it’s a brand I don’t know about, I go to their Web site,” Pappas says. “Do they have a toll-free number? Do they have a street address that’s in the United States? Is there a link to support? Basically the idea is to say what you do, don’t spin things. Your Web site can be a simple brochure. Putting relevant information on there that’s not commercialized, that you’re not trying to monetize is a good way to build trust.”