Boosting website traffic is essential for local businesses: all the visitors to your website are potential customers. However, actually driving traffic and increasing visitors to your site is a challenge – especially for businesses with new websites.

Many businesses are hesitant to invest in advanced traffic strategies until they see a correlation between in-store sales and website visitors. However, without website traffic, a business’ local online marketing strategy will suffer (a perfect example of the chicken and the egg cycle caused by inaction). To get out of the chicken/egg rut, you should learn and master a few local business website traffic strategies and start using them in your marketing mix.

You can drive local business website traffic by learning how to use the right tools and mastering how traffic methods work.

There are three main ways to get more website traffic:

Paid media: PPC and display ads, ad words, sponsored posts, etc.
Owned media: websites, blogs and social media pages
Earned media: free publicity, word of mouth, social media mentions/shares/reposts, positive reviews and organic SEO
Read on for a website traffic overview and then decide which method works best for your local business — without spending a large portion of your marketing budget.