Optimize Current Site Traffic Before Focusing on SEO Nicci Troiani Many small businesses want to drive more traffic to their sites to ultimately get more leads. Is that wrong? No– of course not. However, a mistake that a lot of small businesses make is focusing on SEO and traffic generation and not focusing enough on the traffic that is already going to your company’s site. So how do you get the most out of what you are currently working with? Here’s our checklist: 1. Contact Capture Forms You should have at least one contact capture form on your website. If you don’t have a way for visitors to submit their information, you are definitely losing leads! Here is an example from Baby Sleep Whisperer: 2. Calls to Action You should offer “lead bait” for your contact capture forms– ask visitors to fill out the form but offer something of value in return– a discount, a whitepaper or a free demo are great examples. You should have calls to action on multiple pages each with different offers to optimize your forms submissions. 3. Automated Email Campaigns Use a small business marketing automation software to create automated drip nurturing campaigns. With e-mails going out automatically, you don’t need to follow up with every single lead– the software will do it for you! This way, you know that you are reaching out to all of your leads. 4. Sales Rep Follow Up Again, if you are using a small business CRM or marketing automation software (not sure if marketing automation is right for your small business? Read about it here) then you should be able to trigger automatic tasks to sales reps that are activated when someone’s behavior had indicated that they are interested (clicking on links, opening emails). By using all of these channels to get in touch and follow up with current site visitors, you know that you are not wasting any leads. Contacts who are visiting your site now are people who are already interested. Once you are sure that you have these processes in place, then focus on driving more traffic to your site— now it is optimized for all of those new visitors!