With more and more competition online, being the best sometimes isn’t enough to differentiate yourself from the competition. Google ads has become a very important factor when it comes to getting the word out about your business. But especially if you are a new business, investing in google ads can seem expensive and go over your budget. Today we will go over 4 alternatives for “advertising” for free on google.
Write Content
The blog section is often ignored, but it can be a great way of getting traffic to your page and getting brand recognition if you write interesting and useful articles. Since most people will not use google ads for their blog posts, through SEO best practices it is much simpler for your post to reach the top of the page.
If you are a local company and want to attract local traffic, writing blog posts with local content will easily achieve that top of the page spot you are looking for.
Google My Business (GMB)
Google My Business is a great way of giving people the information they are looking for about your business in a simple and fast way. But Google My Business is also a great way of ranking your website higher in google maps. You should try and fill in as much of your GMB sections as possible, but the most effective ones are the following:
- Subcategories: You will most probably already have set your main service as the category for your business, but if you offer a variety of services. You will want to add any of these other services for which you want to compete in as subcategories. These subcategories can also include specifications about your main service, for example if your service is vegan-friendly or offers a budget or luxury service, these details can also be added as subcategories.
- Answer Questions: while the questions section of your GMB page is great for answering questions people might have, you can also prevent them having to ask those questions by creating and answering the questions that you believe people will want to ask. This will also help your business appear higher according to what the person is looking for.
For example, if someone is looking for “Vegan restaurant” and you have added the following to your question section:
Question: Do you offer vegan meal options?
Answer: Yes, we do.
This question will appear at the top of your “Question and Answers” section as it includes the keywords that they looked for, and will give the person assurance that you are the type of business they are looking for before clicking.
List Your Business on other Directories
While Google My Business is the most important directory for your business, adding your business to other directory such as Bing Places or Trip Advisor can help you get more traffic. Bing Places for example is like GMB but for the Bing search engine (default for Windows computers), which even if it doesn’t have as much traffic as Google, is still used by a good amount of people. Other directories will often appear first on google, for example in the case of restaurants, it is very common that the Trip Advisor page appears first even before the restaurant’s website, as people are often looking to see what other people think about the restaurant.
Google Shopping/ Free Listings
Google shopping allows you to list your products on the shopping section. From the google merchant centre you have access to free listing which are products that will be shown there at no extra cost. While the main reason is to appear in the shopping section, your products can also appear in other sections of google, such as google images, so if someone see the image of the product, they can then click on the image and go straight to your page to purchase it.
As you can see, even if your budget is running low, there are still a few ways you can increase traffic to your website through Google. We hope that our post has helped you learn something new. Please do not hesitate to get in touch with us for more guidance or if you need help with increasing your traffic.
