However lovely your business website is to look at, it is no use to you whatsoever if it never gets any visitors. Without visitors (or traffic) to your website it can't help you to make sales, get people to sign up for your offers, or tempt people to visit your shop, business or restaurant.

A website with good traffic on the other hand (particularly if the traffic is free) can bring you lots of new customers, allow you to reduce your current advertising spend and most importantly, bring a major boost to your bottom line profits.

The question is though, how do you get traffic to your local business website?

One of the best ways to get started is Search Engine Optimisation which is often known as SEO for short. This is where you make changes to your website so that the search engines will rank it highly for relevant search terms.

So what does this mean in real terms for your business?

Let's consider the example of an electrician in Bolton... When people are looking online for an electrician in their local area, they are likely to search in Google for 'electrician town name' so in our example they would search for 'electrician bolton'. Google would then give them relevant results for this search term.

If your electricians website was one that appeared on the first page of results then you would get totally free, very targeted traffic to your website, hence more customers and bigger profits!

And the good news is, if you are a business that caters to any local audience (such as a hairdresser, plumber, restaurant etc), then local SEO is relatively simple to do yourself without having to employ an SEO company that could cost you thousands!

Whilst there is unfortunately not room in this article to explain all the steps you need to take to optimise your website for local search terms, here are a few of the basics to get you started:

1. Do Your Keyword research

It's important to do thorough research before deciding what keywords you'll focus on when optimising your website. Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (search for 'Keyword Tool' in Google) to see what people are searching for relating to your business type in your area. Optimise your website for these keywords.

2. Select a Keyword Rich Domain Name

If possible, use your best keyword as your domain name. In our example above, electricianbolton.co.uk would be an ideal domain name if that is what people search for. This may not always be possible if, for example, you already have a business website and don't want to change the domain name, but it is a major factor in SEO and so very beneficial if at all possible.

3. Use Search Engine Friendly URLs that Include Your Keywords

As well as in your domain name itself, you should also use keywords in the url for each page on your site. In our electrician example, if you had found a keyword of 'electrical services bolton' then you should add a page with the url electrical-services-bolton.html to your website. Of course it is important that the content you add to that page is relevant to the keyword too.