You’ve got a website for your business – is it working hard enough for you? Is it generating leads, meeting your conversion or website performance targets?
Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t maximise their online presence. So how do you make the most of your online presence?
Here’s my top 10 tips to get the most out of your online investment, to help you get more customers and grow your business…
1. Get it right for Google!
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is critical to getting your online visibility as good as it can be. If you can’t afford to work with a SEO specialist, make sure you write good page content with the right keywords, update your site regularly, and get relevant and quality backlinks (inbound links) to your site.
2. Is your website easy to use?
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and review your website content (regularly!), not just when you create the website. All to easy to forget it once you finally get it live with a big sigh of relief!
3. Window on your website…
Track what’s happening on your website frequently – the exact frequency really depends on your business type. E-commerce should be daily and if you have non-transactional website, minimum monthly. Use Google Analytics on your website, it’s free and provides powerful and actionable insights into how your web users are interacting and navigating around your site. It can show where you need to make changes and where you have got things spot on.
4. Get your business on the map
Use Google Places to create a FREE listing for your business – this tool can help significantly with your search engine rankings.
5. Get listed
Use free directory listing sites to boost your web presence like FreeIndex, TouchLocal, Yell, Thomson Directories, HotFog – there are loads out there! All free for small business marketing on a shoestring.
6. Add a blog…
A blog can be integrated into your other online marketing effectively but you need to blog regularly not just twice a year. If you think you will struggle with regular fully-fledged blog posts – take a look at Twitter – a micro-blogging tool that can be a very powerful marketing tool in your mix.
7. Use your existing customer database to full effect
Email marketing is still acknowledged as one of the most effective and low cost marketing tools, especially in business to business marketing. In a recent survey, businesses indicated that email was their preferred communication method. Regular email updates and newsletters to existing customers can be highly effective. Ensure you divide up your email campaigns to the right target audience and adapt the messages to make them as relevant as possible. Make sure you use your website to capture database sign ups to build your own database. Bought in data is never as good as home grown.
8. Get rich
Consider adding rich media content – video in particular can be powerful on your website, blog and emails. The search engines (especially Google as owners of YouTube!) love video and it can be very low cost to do. Consider using YouTube to get you started and link back to your website. We can help you with low cost video for your website – just get in touch.
9. And get social…
People now spend more time on social networking sites than on their email and other mediums, so integrate social media into your marketing approach. You can set up a Facebook Business Page, which is public (so Google will find it), and promote what you do to gain ‘fans’. Remember to add a ‘Follow us on Facebook’ (Twitter et al) button on your website, blog and emails. Always integrate what you are doing to get maximum marketing impact.
10. Put your news online…
Press Releases are not just for offline, you can also publish online and integrate into your other online channels – website, blog, emails. Edit press releases and add to your website ‘news’ section, publish them on free PR websites like www.PR.com and tweet and Facebook about it.