When I started Rooted Motion Marketing, my vision was clear: to empower small businesses to thrive online through creative and effective digital marketing strategies. At networking events —I quickly realized that many entrepreneurs, particularly those in the creative fields, face similar challenges: limited online visibility, struggling with social media management, and neglected websites. While a website builds credibility and showcases your services, it’s also a powerful tool for attracting new clients—if people can find it.
For me, starting a business from scratch meant my website didn’t come with built-in traffic—zero visitors, zero inquiries, zero presence. It’s a challenge many small business owners face. This blog marks the beginning of my journey of growing website traffic from zero to 100 and beyond, offering practical tips, strategies, and insights to empower small business owners to achieve their online goals.
Building an online presence
Before launching into advanced marketing tactics, I prioritized creating a solid foundation for my website, this is typical to follow after an initial SEO and Marketing Audit for new clients. My site was built from scratch by a fabulous designer, but for optimization, I had to get started, I began with thorough keyword research—a huge step in creating a strong foundation for On-Page SEO. Keyword research isn’t just assuming what your audience is searching, it’s being intentional with the words and phrases your potential clients are actively searching for.
To guide my strategy, I asked myself questions like:
- What are my clients searching for? Consider the specific problems they’re trying to solve or the services they need.
- What natural words or phrases would bring up my services or products? It’s essential to align with how your audience speaks and searches.
- Are local keywords important to include? For small businesses, adding geographic terms like “Fort Worth marketing” or “DFW SEO services” can make a big difference in attracting nearby clients.
- Answering these questions allowed me to tailor my website’s content in a way that resonates with both search engines and my target audience. I identified long-tail keywords—those more specific and less competitive phrases that are gold for small businesses starting out. This thoughtful approach helps me create content that not only ranks but also converts.
By focusing on the right keywords, I ensured my site wasn’t just a beautiful digital brochure—it became a tool that actively drives visibility and engagement.
Once the keyword research is complete I then optimized the On-Page SEO which included:
- Crafting compelling, keyword-rich title tags for each page, ensuring they were concise and informative.
- Writing persuasive meta descriptions that accurately summarized the content of each page and included relevant keywords.
- Compressing images to improve loading speed and added descriptive alt text to enhance accessibility and SEO.
For technical SEO, since mobile searches are just as important as desktop searches, ensuring a fast-loading, mobile-friendly website is crucial (and checking all the links are working). Once those steps were completed I submitted my XML sitemap to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to help search engines discover and index my website’s pages. Since my site was on Showit the sitemap was slightly different from /sitemap.xml on some platforms, Showit’s sitemap can be found in this format https://yourdomain.com/siteinfo.xml I’m excited to share the first glimpse into my website’s traffic journey!
Initial Insights
So far, I’ve seen encouraging results. While a significant portion of my initial traffic comes from direct visits, it’s exciting to see organic social media starting to contribute. And my first organic search visitor? A major milestone! It’s clear that a combination of direct outreach, social media engagement, and SEO is a winning formula.
Looking ahead, I’ll be focusing on refining my content to improve user engagement and exploring more advanced SEO techniques to boost organic search visibility. Stay tuned as I share my progress and insights on this journey!
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