Looking for a low-cost/no-cost way to generate website traffic? If so, then this article should help you navigate the waters, clear the smoke, and help you find the potential customers that are looking for your business or services online.

The big questions are:

1. How many customers are you getting from you search efforts on the main search engines?
2. Are you using the web to attract new customers?
3. Do you feel like you are missing out on a big opportunity?

Believe it or not, there so many resources available that can help you create a presence online. Just think about some of the things you search for when you open up Google, Bing or Yahoo. Moreover, we all know that the infamous phone book does serve a purpose anymore, except in my case, I use it to keep the door open to my home office.

With the various local businesses I work with, I always recommend that they look at doing a local “buzz” effort.  Best of all, much of this “buzz” is free, or available at a low cost!

Local listings are on the increase and people searching for products and services are doing it on-line.  A local “buzz” campaign will optimize the local listings and maps on various website

Instead of rambling on, I will dive into three things you can do to improve your local “buzz

1 – Get a domain name

First, make sure your website has a domain name that customers can associate with your business.

Do not rely on having your services just use an online directory, like Yelp. You cannot control them, and there are advertisements running next to your content — possibly ads for your competition!  Moreover, I am sure that your competitor would not allow you to advertise on their website.

2 – Optimize, optimize, optimize

Make sure to optimize your website for local search. Use the basic “on-page” search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, and it should help you get the ball rolling.

You need to determine what basic “keywords” your business need to show up in when potential customer are scouring the web. For example, if you are a dispensary in Spokane, you will want to rank for a phrases like “dispensary Spokane,“ or, “Spokane dispensary.“ You can also do the same for other areas you want to draw customers from. Make sure that you include your business name and two or three of those keywords in the title tag of your web page (you can find the title tag within the html code).

Also make sure to include keywords in your Header tags <h1, h2, h3>.  Make sure you do not over do it, as the search engines will slap your wrists and move you down in the rankings.  Write the headlines in a natural language.

Another thing you will want to do is include your brick and monitor business address on every page your site has  It will help with your local search rankings. Remember, Google and the other search engines can determine which pages relate to your business listing!

Google, Yahoo, Bing … local business profiles, oh, my!

Are you taking advantage of the FREE business profiles for small business? Are you aware of them? Believe it or not, many businesses do not know about them, or do not take advantage of them. To this date, I just shake my head and wonder why.

Make sure you do it, as you do not want someone else to claim your local profile. If you don’t claim it, you might be dealing with a “map spam” issue that mostly affects Google Local listings.

The main reason to claim your stake on these local listing sites is that they can help you rank high in search results on Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Below are links to help you with the process of setting up your local listings on the three big search engine sites.

1. Google Local
2. Yahoo Local
3. Bing Places

The above are just some basics, and a good start. Hopefully, this will help you start your local buzz!

In future articles, I will hit upon other ideas that are low-cost/no-cost to help you and your business move forward.