A question we often get asked by our clients is now that I have a website built, what is the best way to get traffic so I can start generating leads?

There are a couple avenues to this question and we’re going to cover two online marketing options. Paid Search Reasults (SEM)  and Organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are two very effective solutions we use for our clients.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic SEO is typically the act of optimizing your websites so that they allow search engines to parse them more easily for the keywords that your customers are looking for. This can be broken into two tactics, On Page SEO and Off Page SEO.

On Page SEO refers to optimizing your website content so that the density of keywords and phrases is at a high enough level that search engines see your website as a quality resource for their customers.  When working on a customer’s On Page SEO, we need to focus on three areas , website content, metadata (page descriptions and keywords in the code that the viewer doesn’t see) and how we are going generate fresh content. Generating fresh content through creating articles and blogs is the number one way to boost your on page SEO. It also has the benefit of educating and building your customer’s trust in your business.

Off Page SEO refers to creating links to your website from other websites. This is what you’ll run into when you get cold called for SEO. They’re selling back link generation and not on page seo. There are White Hat (good) and Black Hat techniques in generating off Page SEO, and you need to be careful of who you go with, as the wrong person with the wrong techniques could get your website banned all together. You can build links in quite a few ways, a few that are free and easy are online directories, adding your website to forum submissions, and creating articles that link to your website through social media .

Keep in mind that building quality SEO takes time, and to get the results you’re looking for may take up to 6 months. This however is an investment and the results will last for a long time.

Paid Search or Sponsored Advertising

We like to compliment SEO with SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with sponsored ads. The reason is that while SEO is an investment that builds you page rank over time, SEM is fast and can shoot you to the top of the page results within an afternoon. It’s pay per click which means you’re paying each time an individual clicks on your link. That doesn’t mean someone can just sit there and run up your bill. There are safe guards that track each click to make sure that the same computer is only registered once every 24 hours.

With SEM you get a lot of benefits. You can set your daily budget, your max pay per click, and even your country, province and city of preference. If you want to run ads that only target Regina, Saskatchewan you can see how many times people in that city search for your keywords creating a campaign targeted directly to them. That’s powerful.

When it comes to SEO and SEM a strategy that combines both avenues is the best way to bring traffic to your website. A long term low cost strategy coupled with a short term pay per click campaign will help you generate traffic, generate leads and build a customer base that will last.