How do you promote a new website?
Increasing the visibility of your small business on the internet
With so many options available and with some offering better value than others, to certain types/scales of organisation – medium and small businesses can benefit from assistance developing a realistic, long-term, online marketing strategy
“Internet marketing is a valuable addition to your marketing strategy, or can be a cost-effective replacement for the conventional small business Print Advertising budget – usually spent on Yellow pages ads, local Magazines, trade and industry publications that can cost thousands per year with no real sign of benefit or value for money”
The general areas of internet marketing that should be covered by all businesses can be seen below, listed roughly in order of cost-efficiency:
Word of mouth / networking
Tell friends, family, colleagues past customers and more about your website, mention your website on business cards flyers, branded stationery and promotions.
- Search engine optimisation
Climb higher in the Oranic search results to increase visitors from searches - Pay per click advertising
Display ads across the web on search and websites, you pay for each click to your site - Social Media Marketing
Interact with customers to increase awareness and interest + boost SEO efforts - Email marketing
Collect email addresses from customers and website subscriptions then send them targeted messages
See below for details about each internet marketing “channel”
Internet Marketing Channels
See below for details of each of the different ‘streams’ for generating visitors to your website and increasing sales. Of course using multiple channels at the same time in a campaign will deliver the maximum effects. Each channel has strengths and weaknesses that need to be considered for each business.
Search results from Google, Bing and others are compiled by computer algorithms designed to provide users with relevant and useful results, based on the search terms entered.
Each search engine brand has their own secret algorithm for scoring pages and then showing pages to the user. These complex formulas are constantly changing in an attempt to filter out increasing volumes of irrelevant, spammy and offensive content from search results and hopefully encourage user loyalty to that particular brand of search engine.
Now that so much of day to day life involves technology and interaction with the web through searching for goods or services, the process of improving a website’s performance in the ‘organic’ search results can deliver some of the highest returns of all the available marketing channels.
The Official Word from Google themselves
Google’s spokesman for the quality of Google search results: Matt Cutts explains how Google finds webiste pages through links, “indexes” them (for storage) and then ranks the pages to appear in search results for particular search keywords entered by the user:
So – How do you appear in the search results?
Search engine optimisation is the process of improving a website and the “presence” of a brand on the internet, in order to increase visibility in the organic search engine results. Because search engines do not accept payment for listing in the (organic) search results – this involves optimising a website for hundreds of factors (as Matt Cutts mentions in the video) to improve the website compatibility, whilst creating a quality website that others will want to link-to.
What can you do yourself? There are aspects of SEO that you the business owner can do yourself, to improve progress of your webpages up the rankings.
- But at some point before you reach the top of page 1, you are likely to be held back by competitors who have got the edge over your website, in Google’s opinion at least.
- To get above these competitors in the rankings, you need to invest in Search Optimisation from a reputable provider, who will assure you of proper representation of your business online.
Why shouldn’t I just go with the cheapest provider? In the past, search optimisation involved coding and trickery to fool the search engines to the top of the results, and could be readily bought from suppliers with no questions asked and no guarantees. Some companies still implement these techniques, but they are now being punished, as Google cracks down on spam and develops advanced algorithms, to reward unique, useful and informative websites with higher rankings. Websites that break the guidelines released by Google for search results are penalised and held back in the results, those who flagrantly break the rules can be banned from the search engines completely.
SEO in 2011
Search engine optimisation in 2011, still involves technical aspects related to writing clean & compliant website coding and enabling search engine spiders to read and access all the content. But the more important considerations are creating and producing unique and useful content and then creating interest elsewhere on the web in the form of brand name mentions or even better – links back to your website.
You can read more about Search Optimisation Services or continue reading the article below
Pay per click Adverts
To advertise on Google search results and their content network of thousands of commercial and private websites; advertisers sign up for an AdWords account, create text or image adverts and choose lists of keywords or phrases that will trigger their ads at a set or automatic cost per click (CPC/CPM) up to a specified budget
What is PPC?
What are the advantages of PPC?
- The main advantage is that you can expect clicks and traffic from adverts almost immediately.
- Adverts can be displayed to a vast number of potential customers both nationally and internationally by specifying adverts geographically.
- As well as advertising on the Google search pages, you can also advertise on the ‘content network’ consisting of millions of websites with Google advertising banners and text adverts.
- If ads are well designed and the landing pages on your website that the ads link to are relevant – you will be rewarded with a higher quality score and pay less for each click through from the adverts
How to advertise in the google sponsored links?
You could easily start advertising yourself by setting up a business Google account, and activating the Adwords advertising feature. But its possible you could waste a lot of money buying clicks for visitors who would never be your customers. Google have made it very easy to signup and start but incredibly complex to manage cost-efficiently.
A properly setup adwords account with well written text adverts, along with very targeted keywords and locations that trigger your adverts, you will benefit from much lower click costs and better quality visitors that you are buying to visit your website.
- The Account setup service, to populate your account with keywords and multiple adverts is available
- The PPC Setup service can be accompanied by the ongoing adwords management services, to fully manage your account, increasing and decreasing bids on your behalf, writing new adverts, and responding to new opportunities that arise within your niche
- Ongoing management means more efficient advertising spend, and continual improvements to this stream of leads to your website
Read more information about PPC management services or continue below
Social Media Marketing
Facebook now has over half a billion users worldwide, whilst twitter, buzz and linkedin are growing and productive environments for businesses to interact with each other and potential customers. To compliment a business website and SEO services there are a range of social media marketing services, carefully selected to best suit your business message, requirements and budget.
Embracing new technologies, collaborating with and learning from the vast on-line digital marketing community, enables clients to benefit from the latest and greatest ‘white-hat’ social media optimisation techniques. Keep up to date with social trends that could influence your Internet marketing success and also gain valuable feedback on the best way to harness social media to boost your brand and drive sales.
Social media marketing aims and objectives:
Community building:
- Social networks are places where people look for others sharing similar interests.
- If your business (and the market your business operates in) can in some way provide use or interest to the on-line community, it’s possible to build strategic online relationships with customers.
- Satisfied and loyal customers can be encouraged to provide testimonials, leave reviews and feedback, enhancing trust in your brand.
Whilst potentially gaining the benefits of free brand awareness from customers recommending you to their own social networks, visitors coming from these kinds of sources tend to have very high conversion rates.
Brand building
- Every social media campaign aims at increasing awareness and motivating people to communicate with each other about a brand.
- Encourage on-line discussion about your brand and you can boost reputation, visibility and recognition.
- Respond to enquiries, concerns and complaints to diffuse potential problems and demonstrate a modern, interactive and responsive impression of your business
Traffic generation
- Publishing links back to your website home page and especially individual pages (deep linking) on social networks is a great way of increasing the awareness of your business as a whole.
- Deep links enable visitors on your social media sites, to bypass your home page and go straight to the service or product page they were after.
Reputation management
- Online reputation management aims to monitor and respond to the online discussion of your brand, products and services.
- Take this one step further by encouraging customers to leave recommendations, your business can gain traffic that is highly relevant and converting.
- Online reputation management can also be implemented in a very selective way, as social media channels can be used to target specific demographics within tight geographic locations.
Read more about social media marketing services here or continue reading below
Email Marketing Services
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing methods but with a genuine list of subscribers and some interesting news and resources, email marketing can deliver high returns on investment to many types of business. Use your own list of contacts or incorporate a website subscription box to build your email marketing list of contacts.
- Email marketing software setup
- Open and click-through tracking
- Extensive reporting and analysis
- Ongoing management options
- Prices start at £149 for setup and templates
- Fully managed campaigns, with emails authored and sent on your behalf, available
How does email marketing work?
After website launch and some online profile building, you should be inundated with enquiries, leads and customers. Visitors who choose to provide their email in a transaction or choose to be on your mailing list, can become your email marketing database.
Each month you can send out your latest targeted marketing messages to the database you have gathered and receive performance reports, tracking email opens and clicks through to your website.
- Industry standards suggest that roughly around 25% of recipients will open the email
- Of course you can’t send out an email every day and expect these kinds of results!
- A scheduled, high quality email sent out once or twice a month, will deliver impressive conversion rates
What can you do yourself?
Some tips to start you on the process of helping to promote your website, yourself.
Word of mouth marketing
- Distribute business cards, flyers, leaflets and promotions with your website address on
- Encourage past customers to leave reviews on your profiles on Business directories such as Thomson local, Yell, and Freeindex
Website marketing
- Publishing news, information and updates on your website is one of the best things you can do to build trust in your business and prove to Google that your business is topical, informative and relevant to customers, and deserves to rank highly in search results.
- Taking photos of your work or products can help to keep your website fresh and up to date
- Adding information about new products or services helps to keep your website current
- Publishing news or articles on your website, about your industry that potential customers may find interesting, can be a great way of attracting visitors and increasing the trust of those visitors by demonstrating your knowledge / skills
- Create a Google business account, register for Google Places, list your business details exactly as they appear on your website
- Create a Microsft Bing account, register your business for Bing Maps (used by facebook)
Create accounts with business directories
- Yell
- Thomson local
- Freeindex
- Yelp
- BestOf
- Local reviews websites
- + thousands more directories
Social media marketing
Create accounts with the most popular social media websites, and social bookmarking websites. Thoroughly fill out your profile on each platform using different biography text on each.
- Publishing status updates about your business reassures customers you are active and helps to encourage brand loyalty
- You can meet potential customers on social networks
- You can encourage past customers to support you and encourage them to recommend you to their friends
- Publishing links back to pages on your website, helps Google and other search engines to find your content
- By gaining followers on your network, your Social network profiles become more influential and “authoritative” in the eyes of Google
- High authority profiles get more shares, and can feature in search results
Email marketing
- Get an email newsletter signup form on your website to start collecting emails
- Get an email newsletter signup integrated into your e-commerce shopping cart to target past customers
- Manage your list of subscribers and send them emails 2/3 times per month about your latest news, industry news and resources they may find interesting.
