When you start your new business there are lots of things that need to be organised like setting up a virtual office, getting your telephone answering in place and designing all of your marketing materials. One of the items that generally gets left until last which should however be one of the first items off the rank is setting up your website.
A lot of people think that getting your business online is simply about building a nice website and making it accessible on the internet. Maybe that was the case 10 years ago but unfortunately, these days getting your site up is just the first stage and then the serious work starts in terms of driving good convertible traffic to your site.
The two primary ways that people drive traffic to a website are through paid search and organic search. Paid search includes things like Adwords, Bing, Banner adverts and paid directories. Organic search is traffic that has been generated by using free web listings and by carrying out SEO (search engine optimisation) on your website.
There are lots of ways that people generate free traffic. Here are a few of them.
The timeline for seeing results in search engine rankings can vary significantly based on the industry you operate. In highly competitive sectors, the process may extend over several months to a year before noticeable improvements are observed. On the flip side, if your business operates in a less competitive industry, you could potentially start seeing ranking improvements within just a few weeks. It’s essential to recognize that the competitiveness of your industry plays a crucial role in determining the pace at which your online visibility and search rankings evolve.
Adwords for competitive industries can be very expensive ($20 plus per click is not unknown) while not-so-competitive industries can be relatively cheap (as low as a few cents). Unfortunately, you won’t know until you try it out.
If you have a good understanding of the way that the internet works then it probably won’t take too long to also learn about how SEO and SEM work. It is probably worth considering that an SEM professional probably devotes a lot of their time to internet marketing and would have done so for quite some time.
Getting unnatural links will likely cause more harm than good. Google has algorithms in place to look for unnatural links.