Category: Web Marketing

If you sell your products or services to a number of different locations then you need to ensure that your website is ranking well for them so that you can get traffic to the site. If for example, you have a hair salon in one town but know that people are happy to travel from other nearby towns to come to your salon, then you need to ensure that you can be found on the search engines. There are a number of different ways in which you can get your business found in other locations. You may decide that you want to use social media to do this and join local groups to promote your business, or you may use Google Adwords which will allow you to create adverts that show to specific locations. If you want to get your website found on the search engines for other areas but do not want to do paid for advertising then you need to work on your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

In order to get ranked for other areas, you need to have content on your site that is relevant to that specific location. For example, you may create a page for hairdressing salons in Northampton and then another one for Hair dressing Salons in Wellingborough. Depending on the level of competition for that phrase, one page may not be enough but you can build this up over time.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is effectively optimising your site in such a way to improve its rankings on sites such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Every website should be built with SEO in mind but often, especially older sites are lacking some of the basic elements let alone the advanced SEO techniques.  If your website seems to be lacking in traffic and you cannot find your site on the first page or so on Google for your mains search terms, you need to start looking at your SEO.

If when you had your site built, you did ensure it was SEO friendly, that may have been great to start with, but over time this will need to be tweaked and new pages optimised to allow your SEO to build.

Getting SEO wrong can be worse than not doing it at all as you can find your site penalised and therefore removed from the search engine listings entirely. Simple mistakes such as putting text in white on a white background or having duplicate pages with the same content on can get your site blacklisted. When doing SEO be sure to use a company or individual that has the relevant experience to carry out the work.

As a business owner, it is important to constantly be thinking of ways in which you can grow your business. You may decide to do a Pay per Click advertising campaign, invest your time and money in SEO to improve your organic rankings and therefore increase traffic to your website, or to get your existing customers to help.

If you are confident that you offer a good level of customer service and your customers are happy with the products or services you sell, then you can use this to boost your business. Offering existing customers a referral process where they get rewarded will undoubtedly help bring in more customers. You need to make sure that the referral process is quick and easy. Making people wait months for their reward can put some people off. If you have an ecommerce website then you can automatically send people a voucher as soon as the person they referred places an order. This may be money off voucher, free delivery or free gift.

You may also want to give the new customer a special offer too as this will entice the refer and the new customer into completing a sale. Be sure you have a way of tracking the referrals effectively to ensure everyone gets the reward they should.

Marketing can eat up a large amount of the budget for a business, but if done correctly, should eventually start to pay for itself. You should get back more than you invest in marketing to make it worthwhile, although some results may take some time to come through. Online marketing is vast and there are many areas that you can invest in. Social media marketing, search engine optimisation and pay per click are all forms of marketing that require time and possibly a budget to implement.

You can choose to use internal staff, third party individual or marketing agency. All forms of marketing have advantages and disadvantages and who you choose to use is often dependant on the budget as a marketing agency will offer you great service but it will usually cost more than a using a freelancer.

If you chose to keep the marketing of your business in-house, then you should look to employ someone who has experience and knowledge in this area. The role may not need to be full time to start with but as your business grows you can look to grow your marketing into a department should you need to.

If you are a business owner then you may have heard of the term micros sites. Micros sites have, over the years, been used for a number of different things. Some of the big companies still use micro sites today. But what are they and should you have some?

A micro site is usually a 3-4 page mini website that has information on it that is very relevant to a specific topic or product. Often the micro site will link back to the main website in order to gain traffic that way too.

Micro sites are often used when a company wants to give a big push on a particular service or product but does not want to make too many changes on their main site. If you own a toy shop for example, and there is a new toy due to hit the market, you may want to create a micro site that has videos, reviews and images all relating to that product. If someone then wants to buy that product, you may link back through to your main site for the checkout procedure to be completed.

Micros sites can sometimes be used for marketing campaigns such as Google Adwords or for offline advertising in a newspaper for example.