Make your online marketing work

Web marketing has two main objectives: (i) driving traffic, ie visitors, to your website, and (ii), turning these visitors into customers. You drive traffic to your website by ranking highly in Google and other search engines, from online or ‘pay per click’ (ppc) advertising and advertising on other sites, from email marketing and other activities such blogs and even getting an account on a social networking site like My Space or Facebook. And of course, you should also factor in your offline or traditional marketing activity in your traffic generation programmes.

The activities you need to consider are a mix of one-off and continuous tasks:

Keyword analysis: this is probably the most important activity. Keywords are the words that you and I use in Google when looking for products or services on the Internet. Find the words that people use when looking for what your company supplies, use these exact words in your website, and bingo: Google matches your website to a search query and your website is on the first page of its results. Try it now. Visit http://inventory.overture.com and type in a term that you think people will use when looking for your products or services, and see if brings up any hits. If it does then this might be a term that you should include in your website copy.
Link building: Along with keyword matching or relevance, the popularity of your site is an important factor too. Popularity is measured in relevant, inbound links to your sites, ie other sites with hyperlinks to your site. But strong internal links can be important as well, providing a pointer to the search engines about popular pages within your site
Online Advertising (PPC): provides a fast path to page 1 of Google and Yahoo. With Google AdWords and Yahoo SearchMarketing, ads are displayed free; charges are incurred only when someone clicks on your ad, hence pay per click. The price is based on the cost of the word that resulted in your ad being displayed. The popularity of the word will determine the cost. Ad position is based on how much you’re prepared to pay, a) for each keyword you want to trigger your ads, and b) per day (and you can cap both budgets). But your landing page is also a very important factor. If the page that is linked to your ad bears little resemblance to what your ad is saying, your ad is unlikely to figure highly.
Optimisation: (also known as search engine optimization or SEO): Use the best keywords identified from keyword research in your website copy (text). Your website copy is actually read by the search engines' spiders or robots that crawl the Internet and index websites and their content (hence the reason why you don't need to submit your site to the search engines - they'll find you. Carefully incorporating relevant keywords into your website copy is the most important thing you could do to get your website seen and discovered on the web. There's a good guide to SEO over at million-dollar-blog.com.
Email marketing: A key component, not only for driving traffic, but for building a profile of your customers and visitors over time, such that your emails become increasingly relevant and targeted. Email marketing isn't about sending a few emails from Outlook, but about broadcasting professional emails that look like your website, and importantly, enable tracking of what links are clicked in the email to help you analyse what's important to your subscribers. To do this properly, you need a separate email marketing package and there are many out there - just type 'email marketing' into Google to find out. However, we've used one provider for a long time and are very happy with the price and features of iContact. Take a look - they give you a free 15-day trial to get the feel of just what it can do for your online marketing efforts

If you're interested in finding out how OPWS can help you with your website marketing, call 07970 578268 today or email us at website.design@opws.co.uk.