Have you done a Google search for your product lately and noticed a curious change in search results?

Lately, no matter your search query, Reddit posts have been coming up excessively in Google product review search results. As of February 2024, Search Engine Land says, “Reddit shows up 97.5% of the time in Google Search product review queries and accounts for nearly two-thirds of the slots reserved for Google’s Discussions and forums SERP feature.” The article goes on to dive into this new wrinkle in the Google search algorithm:

“An analysis of 10,000 key phrases found that discussions and forums appear 77% (7,702) of the time. Overall, 766 individual forums appeared, but just Reddit and Quora had 3X greater visibility than every other forum:

Reddit appeared in 7,509 results and was featured 14,263 times.
Quora appeared in 3,513 results and was featured 3,832 times.
Every other domain (766 of them), combined, appeared 4,989 times, with most sites never getting a second listing like Reddit. Some were inactive but there were no new forums or any forums with a low number of posts.”

The results speak for themselves. While a Reddit spokesperson has denied it to Search Engine Land, Google is clearly pushing Reddit. Unfortunately, that visibility leads to Reddit spam. While not all of Reddit is spam, Search Engine Land found that much of the content within these Reddit links were affiliate URLs and AI-generated comments.

What Does this Mean for Small Business Owners?

Other industry insiders have offered insight into why Reddit has begun to dominate Google search results. For one, Reddit can sometimes be helpful to people. In 2022, Google published a blog post explaining it decided to add an extra “E” to its E-A-T Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. That new “E” stood for “experience,” as Google determined an online forum where people discuss their experiences with different services is sometimes helpful. Reddit also helps Google’s AI systems by better demonstrating how people talk.

Those reasons have their merit. However, they don’t provide any comfort to small business owners who are watching this algorithm change take away traffic from their websites. It can be hard to keep up with Google’s latest changes, so you need to be proactive. You should regularly take the following steps to protect your website traffic:

Use paid search ads, as they are now appearing more and more strongly at the top of search engine results pages.
Regularly post engaging content to your social media sites to drive traffic to your website.
Build your YouTube channel with high-quality video content that drives viewers to your website.

In this article, we’ll walk you through how to achieve each of these goals so you’ll feel more confident in keeping your site’s Google’s organic search traffic strong.

An Overview of Paid Search Ads

As SEMrush says, “Paid search advertising is a digital marketing strategy where brands pay to display their ads on major search engines.” On Google, these are known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads. PPC ads can be text, display, or video. The goal of these advertisements are to appear at the top of Google search engine results pages.

This is important because when people search on Google, only up to four ads are eligible to show above the search results. Google’s Quality Score factors determine when an ad is successful and thus appears at the top of search results. The factors they consider to determine your ad placement include bid amount, ad quality, and landing page quality. It should go without saying that well-crafted ads with relevant content will score higher than others.

What are the Benefits of Paid Search Ads?

Well-executed paid search ads can greatly improve your digital marketing strategy results. Here are some benefits that you can expect:

You’ll be able to efficiently reach your target audience: You can target your audience through paid search ads based on relevant keywords. You can also segment further based on location, language, search behaviors, and more. With this level of precision, you’ll have a better chance of reaching people who are the most likely to engage with your brand.
Paid search ads are a cost-effective tactic — Paid search ads only have to be paid for when someone clicks on your ad. This tactic gives you better advertising budget control. You’ll be able to decide ahead of time how much you’re going to pay for each keyword. You’ll also be able to set a maximum daily spend limit to keep your ad budget where it needs to be.
You’ll see effective and immediate results — Paid search ads provide results faster than other marketing strategies like SEO-optimized content. That’s because your ads will appear in search results and start driving traffic as soon as your new campaign goes live. These campaigns are also measurable, as you’ll be able to track the number of ad clicks and impressions to conversions and return on investment (ROI).
The market dictates the price of keywords — Market demand and the resulting competition for specific keywords determine the cost of paid search ads. So if your preferred keyword is a bit expensive, you can bid on a similar word or phrase with lower competition. That will keep your ad costs down while still bringing your target audience to your website.

How to Use Your Social Media Platforms to Drive Traffic To Your Website

One of the easiest and most effective ways to drive high-quality traffic to your website is by staying engaged across your social media channels. If you start by engaging with your followers, that will help to get more eyes on your posts and various platforms. That, in turn, will help to grow brand familiarity. Once you have that expanded social presence, you can leverage it to drive traffic back to your website.

Keep in mind that this won’t be a one-size-fits-all strategy. It changes depending on which social network you are on. Here’s a look at how you can leverage YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to drive more traffic to your business’s website.

How to Promote Your Business Effectively On YouTube

You can create a YouTube channel for free for your business through YouTube Advertising. This provides you one spot to post product tutorials, walk-throughs, and event footage to your most engaged followers. YouTube boasts the following stats on the effectiveness of YouTube Advertising:

72 percent of small businesses think getting started on YouTube is easy.
65 percent of small-business owners with a YouTube channel say they use it to showcase their products and services.
85 percent of viewers turn to YouTube for fresh content.

To begin leveraging your YouTube channel for business, you should start by customizing your channel. Add a channel icon and banner to represent your brand. Then, fill out your business information. Provide a concise mission statement in the channel description and insert your business website and other social media networks in the links section.

Once you’re all set up, you can begin to find your brand’s biggest fans by using the channel to your advantage. Start creating videos and leverage the following tricks:

Encourage viewers to subscribe – Create an engaging video that shows off your product or service. End the video by encouraging viewers to subscribe to your channel. It’s the best way to let your audience know when you’ve uploaded a video or created a new playlist.
Leverage cross-promotion across social media — Did you create a video you’re really proud of? Share it on Facebook and Instagram too! When you have a great piece of content, the more eyes on it the better.
Use the right keywords in a video’s title, tags and description — Be strategic with the keywords you use in titles, tags, and descriptions. But don’t go after broad keywords, aim for more local, specific keywords. That will help to optimize your videos for SEO.
Work with influencers — Partner with a relevant influencer to create a video that showcases your product and service. The right influencer’s audience will be directly interested in what you sell, which can help drive more traffic to your website.

How to Promote Your Business on Facebook

Facebook boasts more than 3 billion monthly active users, making it a great place to promote your business. With a Facebook Business page, you can direct a portion of those users to your website. When you leverage Facebook for business, you’ll reap the following benefits:

Engage with new and loyal existing customers
Gain a better understanding of your audience through precise analytics
Drive traffic to your website or landing page
Promote your products and services in one place
Reach more potential customers

In order to get the most out of your Facebook Business page, you need to complete your business page profile. Provide appropriate contact information and, if you have a physical storefront, add that location. Include hours of operation along with a profile picture and cover image that accurately represent your business. Finally, add a call-to-action (CTA) button that encourages people to engage further with your business by visiting your website.

After that, it’s time to create some high-quality ads. One way to make those ads as effective as possible is to make really good content. As Wordstream says, “to get the lowest possible cost per click on your Facebook ads, priority number one is making your content so good that it encourages positive engagement.” Facebook’s algorithm will take notice when people share your content. When that happens, Facebook will show your ads to even more people.

How to Drive Website Traffic from Instagram

A common complaint about Instagram is that it doesn’t allow users to add clickable links to their posts. While links like that are the simplest way to bring your audience back to your website, there are other ways to drive traffic back to your site. Here are some ways to do that:

Leverage your Instagram bio — When you initially set up your business’s Instagram profile, put your business website as the link in your Instagram bio, then you can update that link as much as you want. Swap it out when you have a new campaign page, featured news story, or anything else relevant. Draw attention to a new link in the captions of your posts.
Curate relevant Instagram stories highlights — If you want your Instagram stories to last beyond 24 hours, leverage the highlights feature. Come up with some relevant, evergreen themes. Create high-quality stories that belong under those umbrellas. Make sure each highlight includes a relevant call-to-action that urges users to go to your business’s website.
Partner with Instagram influencers — If you need to work on building your Instagram presence, partner with an influencer in your industry. Work with them on creating high-quality content that promotes your products or services. Make sure those videos include links to your website. That can bring a brand-new batch of potential customers to your website.
Add Instagram action buttons to your profile — Are you creating good and engaging content on your Instagram profile and still not seeing a boost in traffic to your website? Consider adding an action button to your profile to see if that helps. That button can lead to whatever page or action you want, which could drive more conversions.

TL;DR Boost Your Social Media Marketing with LNP Media Group

Getting a steady stream of traffic to your business’s website can be tough, especially as Google’s algorithms are constantly changing. However, much of your audience spends a lot of time on Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook, so it’s time to meet them there. Our team can help develop and execute highly effective paid search and social media campaigns that align with your brand and offer consistent messaging that will drive customers to your website.

LNP Media Group’s digital marketing experts are a Google Partner and are Meta Certified to provide your business with paid search ads and social media ads that work.

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How to Diversify Traffic Sources for Your Business’s Website