In the lazy waning days of summer, ambitious Freelancers (and we are all ambitious) can implement a few quick hacks to ramp up leadgen and bring fresh possibilities to our sales pipelines. Now is the time to energize your marketing tactics and push to bring in potential clients who have both motive and money to do business. Setting up for a healthy fourth quarter is everyone’s goal, whether your target clients will return to the office soon or delay until January. Freelance consultants would be wise to encourage local organic traffic to their website, that is, site visits that are not prompted by pay-per-click campaigns by way of Google adwords or some other paid advertising service and are made by bricks and mortar businesses in your geographic location. Enhancing your company’s presence in local organic searches is a potentially game-changing inbound marketing strategy for any company and it’s within your reach.

Let’s pause here for a minute and discuss what is known as referral traffic—- it has significant impact. When a visitor clicks a link to move from one website to another, the original site is considered the referrer. The referring site can be a search engine, a social media platform, a blog, or any website that contains links to other websites. So—-the more you post in digital publications, social media sites and whatever online forums, the more your company name and URL will appear in direct searches. A potential client who has your company on a short list for follow-up will probably visit a big search engine and type in your company name to see what comes up. You’ll want to have several impressive postings available.Organic local site traffic is sent from search engines, most often Bing, Google and Yahoo, and is influenced by Search Engine Optimization.

The better your website ranks for descriptive keywords common in your product or service category, the more readily will your business appear in local organic searches. Big businesses have the advantage, but small and mid-size companies should nevertheless strive to be found. Your digital presence, bolstered by relevant keywords, including long-tail keyword phrases that impact the increasingly important voice searches, will eventually produce an increase in your website’s local organic search traffic and improve your positioning in search results. Here are three free actions that you can take now.

I. Frequent posts

Blogging, writing articles that appear in digital publications and getting quoted in online media outlets will enhance both your credibility and visibility. Frequency is a big plus. If you can keep up and publish a blog or other article or get quoted about once a month, in a few weeks or months your company may show in organic searches, even if not in the coveted top 10 (first page). In 2018, we learned that powerhouse Google follows the E.A.T. algorithm—-Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. In other words, quality content counts.

Your use of key words and long-tail phrases should not be heavy-handed. Sprinkle them into your content where they fit, so when prospects type those words into a search box, or speak them into Alexa or Siri, you’ll increase the chance that your business name will appear in local searches, at least in the top 20 names for your locale.

II. Social media presence

Being active on social media is one of the best ways to communicate and engage with current and potential clients, as you become familiar with their priorities and also drive traffic back to your website. The website hosting service Go Daddy found that 61 % of its high-traffic sites had an attached Facebook page.

While having a Facebook page and Twitter account is more or less considered a requirement for most businesses, establish your company presence on platforms that your clients and prospects follow and trust. B2B likes LinkedIn and Alignable is growing, as is Clubhouse.

III. Search engine sign-up

Register your company on Google My Business and Bing’s Places for Business, free services that will give your organization a boost in local SEO. For best results, provide lots of descriptive info about your business, including optional categories.

Treat your Bing and Google listings like social media platforms. Update them at least quarterly by adding educational info, text. or video and discuss some aspect of a company product or service is a reliable and efficient solution for goals that users want to achieve (but not a sales pitch). If it will be politically correct, ask a couple of clients to write a (positive!) review. Rumor has it that both search engines ignore reviews and other content that is more than six months old.

Thanks reading and Happy Labor Day,

Kim

Image: Traffic gets heavy in a Venice canal, August 2013