I have a business that is in NY and have a website for it. Since creating the website about 6 months ago, we have not gotten much traffic (which was expected, as no one was working on the SEO side of things).

I looked into SEO services and most of them are very expensive ($300+ a month). My business is local so I'm really only interested in targeting people that live in NY.

I don't need a huge SEO campaign, rather something that generates some traffic for business that are in NY. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to approach this? If necessary I will provide the website and business overview. Thanks.

I recently did this for my father's company. I think generally it will take a good amount of time before you get any search traffic.

Have you looked into doing an adwords campaign? you can geo target it to searches within "x" miles of your business or select specific towns/cities

If you cannot afford to outsource your SEO you might be better doing it yourself. Check out SEOmoz.org. They have a lot of good stuff. Depending on the business you probably want to focus on optimizing your Google Places page and getting traffic that way. And it will take time. You can do shortcuts to get faster results but they will not last. I know from experience.

Forget SEO. Try Facebook Advertising. You get to really hyper-target your market there.

just set this up at my internship very simple with about 10 minutes of playing around on there. It will make a circle around whatever address you want with however many miles and you can select as many or as few towns as youd like

Also for cheaper ads go to bing's ad program cant recall the name

the other intern at my job just did this and sounds like the best way to get specific with demographics and it seems to be surprisingly cheap.



general knowledge just try putting content on your site linking to what search words you would want to come up on search engines even if its just blogs about newyork and your product/service. Also look into what your web pages are tagged as

What is your website? Is getting more traffic important for your business?

I think, at a bare minimum, every site should use some basic SEO but SEM is probably what you really want.

Also look into Google Places for business.

Yeah. Setup your Google Places stuff and go across lots of other directories with the exact same information.

There is some really easy and basic grass roots SEO work you need to do on your own....nothing magical about it and with some google searching and research you can find this out. Just have to spend some hours doing it, all for free which is the same thing someone else would do ad charge you $50 an hour to do. (put your website on as many sites and listings as you can etc.)

One big thing you cannot control is simply time, as it takes a while for websites to start ranking higher as it is crawled more, and its generally a good idea to continually update your site every so often if possible with new content. Apparently that is helpful long term.

Make sure your website is decent and professional as this is important, and it is optimized for SEO. If your website sucks and has errors and misspellings fix that first obviously.

There are people on fiverr.com you can pay for $5 to do some small back linking jobs and even just some advice. Do not go crazy and start getting multiple jobs to create tons of back links (I'LL GET YOU 5,000,000 BACKLINKS GAURNATEED!!! ETC), as too much will hurt your website....start slow and small with trying to just get a few that are high quality. A lot of them will be crap and wouldn't do anything anyways, so use the "if it looks to good to be true" adage here.

I am nowhere near an expert, however have been reading up on basic things I can do on my own, and thats simply some very basic personal advice.

facebook ad traffic is still very poor compared to other sources of traffic , thats why its still super cheap .

www.newyorkatmgroup.com

Basically, we provide free ATM placements throughout the 5 Burroughs of NY. The only way we are getting leads now are through referrals and advertising on craigslist. For a while that was fine, because we were tight on funds, but now that we have a nice cushion its time to take it to the next level.

Seems like direct marketing, and having cold callers would be a much better use of your time/money than seo.

Have you tried AdWords?

This. Google places is really important for Local SEO because its pretty much built for local businesses. Make sure you verify your page, and fill out everything you possibly can.

Also get your links on as many relevant reputable sites you can.

Because there are so many people searching for "atm providers nyc" ??

I have always wondered about this business and how it generally works.

If you don't mind getting into a little bit about how you got in this business, or outlining some nuts and bolts of the operation side, challenges, barriers to entry are like, etc. that would be cool-


P.

Also, I would be curious as to what other business type you could partner up with to help basically sell your product and offer leads/referrals to you, as well as you them if possible.

Perhaps some company providing businesses with credit card processors or something for example.

I think SEO is critical for EVERY business these days, however I think there are larger opportunities you need to try and network/spend your time and money on opposed to it. SEO will work itself out over time doing a minimal amount of work, and once you have the excess budget you can throw money at it if you really wanted.

I started a thread which answered a bunch of questions about the business a while back. Run a search - if you can't find it let me know and I'll dig it up for you.