It’s all too easy to get obsessed with optimising your site for Google and imagining that all your traffic will arrive via natural search.  But there are plenty of products and services where search isn’t necessarily the route that prospective customers take. This is particularly the case for professional services, where generic terms are too competitive, and your customer may find it hard to express their rather complex requirement in a small search box.  Then you need to focus more on how external links in related sites can drive relevant traffic to your site in their own right, which has the added benefit of enhancing your pagerank.  The trick is thinking through your customers’ purchase process, and working out which online sites they will use to gather information before looking for a supplier.  Here are five ideas to help you identify these types of links and build referral traffic back to your site. (more…)