Looking Beyond SEO: Capturing more Toronto traffic for your small business

“Build it and they will come”. Not true for the Romans and not true for websites either. Even if you have identified and implemented your website’s critical SEO to gain more Toronto traffic, there are inbound marketing tools and strategies that can help draw more local users to your site.

Google Tools for Toronto Traffic

Google has created a number of tools including specialist business pages such as the Google+ Local Page. Simply by opening up an account, a business landing page is created that specifically highlights your business products and services.

Google Maps help add another dimension to your online presence and registering your business to appear on Google Maps can be vital in pinpointing your location for prospective customers.

Google Maps are integrated into Google+ Local Page to centralize crucial information in one location, and people can easily find you, browse your services, make contact and find your bricks and mortar business.

Perhaps the most important aspect of a Google+ Local Page is its social factor, giving you the ability to engage and interact with visitors, customers and potential customers in real time. Also, such pages allow other businesses to interact via social networking, fostering a community of businesses that may all offer different products and services but share the one locality. It is a perk that a static business website does not offer.

And because Google products are crawled and indexed quickly; your business contact information and any public posts crafted with localized keywords and phrases enhance your SEO opportunities for Toronto searches.

Pay-Per-Click

Pay-Per-Click ads are another choice for generating web traffic.  While tailoring your website SEO for Toronto traffic is always recommended, it can take days and weeks to actually see the results in searches.

Available across search engines (Google & Bing ) and in different social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter, done correctly, done correctly, PPC can generate traffic almost immediately.

PPC does have some downsides, namely the cost, but avoiding certain pitfalls and using a variety of strategies will pay dividends. While larger companies often find themselves in bidding wars for competitive keywords, smaller businesses interested in local traffic can leverage PPC to their budget.

Generally speaking, Pay-Per-Click reacts quickly to market changes, can be used for short term projects and provide local focus making it a smart investment.

Tell your own story

Publisher-produced content commonly referred to as brand content or native advertising is similar to the traditional advertorial but with the user in mind.

While traditional advertorial took the form of raving about a company’s greatness, native advertising is less invasive and ‘user focused’. Many small businesses use native advertising to address questions & concerns or meet their public on commonly related interests like cooking or travel.

Since your business is telling its own story, it’s an opportunity to maximize the SEO opportunities for Toronto traffic.

And content marketing isn’t just limited to the written word. Using different mediums to reach your customer whether videos, blogs, photos is a great way of meeting them at a different point in the buying cycle.

Inbound marketing provides a number of new opportunities, beyond the traditional SEO to capture Toronto traffic, to engage and convert new customers.

Image: Brandpoint

Learn 5 more ways to generate qualified inbound leads from your web site by downloading our free On-Demand Marketing 101 whitepaper.

  • Val Johnson

    Do you think regularly optimizing placements and placement bids in Google Adwords helps prevent wasted spend? You better bet it does. My company was doing PPC in house and I was a little frustrated that the profits simply weren’t justifying the spend. The whole process of regular optimization requires an experienced hand and my in-house employees just didn’t have it. What made perfect sense to me was to outsource it to experts. Simon over at RDM gave us a hand and now we can spend $30k per month on ads without worry because now the investment pays off in profits. Simon’s phone number? Why yes, you may have it: 240-455-3886.