The days of publishing a website online and waiting for customers to find you are dead. This is an especially painful misconception among small businesses that struggle to find new customers. The reality is that the Internet contains well over four billion pages, with millions more being added every day. How can you expect your website to get found online amidst a sea of other options? This is precisely the problem an online marketing consultant can help you solve.
Through a series of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, an online marketing consultant can evaluate your current website and craft a strategy for optimizing your online presence so your needle gets found in the proverbial haystack that is the Internet. Here’s a snapshot of how they do it:
Optimize Your Website With Relevant Keywords
The first step toward getting found online is positioning your website content around specific keywords that your customers are looking for. Your online marketing consultant will analyze your current website, conduct keyword research specific to your industry and target market, and recommend keywords that have the highest volume of monthly searches with the least amount of competition. These keywords will then be integrated into your website page content where appropriate, your image names, your alt image tags, headings, links, and meta descriptions – all of which serve to increase your online presence for those specific keywords. The keywords chosen are extremely important as targeting keywords with too low of a monthly search volume may not yield you any traffic, while choosing keywords with too great of a competition can have the same result. Speak to one of our online marketing consultants to begin a keyword strategy to build your online presence.
Start a Business Blog
Once you have your keywords integrated into your website page content, it’s time to add new content. The concept is simple: The more pages you have that connect you to certain keywords, the higher search engines will rank you in their search results. The more difficult task is creating that consistent stream of new content for search engines to find and rank you for. This is where business blogs fit in. By publishing blog posts targeted around specific keywords you can slowly begin to increase your online ranking for those keywords, bringing your business higher in the list of search results populated by people looking for the solutions your company has to offer. Ideally, businesses should publish 3-5 blog posts a week. Obviously this is a more daunting task for smaller businesses that don’t have the time or the staff to write a blog post every day, or to even create a list of blog topic ideas. This is one area in which many businesses, large and small, seek the help of marketing consulting firms and blog writers to craft relevant, useful content for their industry that are keyword focused. If you need help generating keyword-focused blog content, contact us about our blog writing services. For help generating a list of blog topic ideas
Launch a PPC Campaign
One of the great, easy ways to begin pulling traffic to your website is by implementing Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns. These too should be targeted around your specific keywords (starting to see a pattern here?) in order to gain the highest amount of relevant traffic to your site. The good news is that, as far as advertising goes, these campaigns can be relatively cheap and can be crafted to meet even the smallest budgets. You can also being to see results right away while the website SEO keyword optimization tactics mentioned above will return slower results. PPC campaigns should not however be used as a replacement for keyword optimization and SEO tactics, but rather as part of your overall online marketing strategy. One of the biggest blunders I see in PPC campaigns is campaigns that are not targeted to the right keywords. If you’re not careful, you could spend a lot of money driving visitors to your website that have no interest in purchasing your products and services, so at a minimum keyword research should be performed beginning any PPC campaign.
Leverage Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the glue that binds all your campaigns, content and promotions together. Today’s search engines browse social media platforms for content as well as web pages, and promoting your content on strategic social media channels can help increase your search engine ranking while driving interested parties to your website. But not every social media platform is right for every business. Some of them may be a downright waste of time depending on who your target customer is. An online marketing consultant can help you craft buyer personas, detailed snapshots of your ideal buyers, and make recommendations and craft a strategy for the best ways to reach them, what social media platforms to target, and how to build a following.
The above strategies barely scratch the surface of all the ways an online marketing consultant can help promote your business online. What you should remember is that in order to have a successful online presence you need to do more than just publish a website. To gain further insight into how your business is performing online, contact INFUSEALLY for a free consultation.