Four Online Tips for Small Business to Increase Foot

TrafficThese days, it is important to devise a strategy that makes it easy for customers—and potential customers—to find you online... with the goal of seeing more of them in your store. Many brick-and-mortar businesses have a web site listing their locations(s), provide a brief overview their business, and include lots of pictures. That's great, but it isn't enough.Following are four ways to optimize your business online—to get more feet through your door.

1. Get your business information online. Make sure that your business name and contact information is available on your home page, your About Us page, and your Contact Us page—as well as in the footer of every page on the site.

2. Claim your business on online maps. Google and Bing both have ways for small business owners to claim their business online. This ensures that when someone searches for your business' name on Google or Bing, they can see where your business is located. If you have more than one location, Google and Bing display the store closest to the customer's location (if Location is turned on in their browser). Yahoo! also has a service that lets small businesses be found on Yahoo! local, WhitePages, Yelp, MapQuest, and more.

3. Create valuable and informative site content. Great site content attracts customers. As an example, if you own a vegetarian sandwich and salad shop you might consider blogging or vlogging (video blogging) about the vegetables you use each season and why. Mention the types of vinaigrette you use in combination with kale and quinoa. Creating compelling, rich content is a challenge because it usually takes a while to see a return on your time investment; as such, many times content gets skipped over. But if you can find time to write one compelling message to site visitors each week, it will eventually bring many new customers to your business. And as long as the service they receive is great, they will come back for more!

4. Make it easy to share your site content on social media. Making your content easy to share is essential to improving the quality score of your web site. Higher quality scores translate into higher site rankings when people organically search for businesses such as yours. Having "Share," "Like," and "+1" buttons (for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, respectively) associated with all site content encourages readers to recommend and share content—thereby encouraging others to view it. This increases the number or click-throughs to your site, further improves your site's quality score, and exposes your business to new eyeballs—and their attached feet.