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If you're planning a website or need
to generate more website traffic, you need to start
by thinking strategically about your market. Here's
some tips to help you.
Your starting point should be to look at how people
are currently using the web in your market - both competitors
and customers. Search engines account for about 80%
of all website traffic. Each search is logged and if
you know where to look, you can find out the precise
search phrases people use to find companies like your
own. This includes data about the number of searches
by phrase in each of the main engines and details about
the number of web pages competing for that phrase.
This kind of research is essential because it gives
you an insight into the latent, and possibly unfulfilled,
demand for your service. If there are hundreds of people
a day already searching for what you offer and very
few web pages competing, you'll be in an excellent position
to generate website traffic and revenues as soon as
your website is online. You can optimise for those phrases
or bid for them in the pay-per-click engines like Google
Adwords.
That, unfortunately, is a dream scenario. Whilst there
are and always will be discreet niches to be tapped,
the vast majority of businesses have competitors, some
of whom will be well established online. Generating
more website traffic in this scenario is tougher but
far from impossible.
Strategically, this stage is about understanding the
level of demand and competition in your market. The
next stage is to develop the benefits of your product
or service so that you can create an irresistible sales
proposition. These benefits could include things that
are unique to your business or simply be industry standard
benefits packaged together and expressed in such a way
that they appear unique.
Successful website marketing is all about testing and
measuring every aspect of your promotions. The great
thing about the web is that there are now freely available
performance monitoring tools that allow you to track
the number of people responding to an advertisement,
email, promotion and so on at the click of a button.
The critical point is to build these mechanisms into
your marketing before you start. If your mantra is to
test and measure, you will succeed - it's just a matter
of time.
Search engines are critical to any website marketing
strategy. With 80% of website visits originating from
a search engine, you just can't afford to ignore them,
unless your business is called Ebay or Amazon. There
are two ways to generate traffic to your website through
the search engines - optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click
advertising (PPC).
Pay-per-click allows you to drive people to your site
- you pay each time a prospect clicks on your advertisement.
Many businesses do very well from PPC because they've
either learned how to make it work or hired professionals
to help them. Tactically, PPC is great because it's
so flexible - you can turn it on and off whenever you
like.
While we regard PPC as a tactical tool, we see SEO
as critically important to the medium to long term visibility
of any website. This is why we research the search engines
at such an early stage in any project - by understanding
how your market is using the search engines, we can
get you a head start on the competition. So we ensure
that every site we build is search engine friendly and
that our clients have the plans and tools that will
enable them to build their profiles in the natural search
results of the search engines and generate more targeted
traffic to their website.
Other tools that may comprise a complete online marketing
solution could include:
- business blogs enabling you to communicate dynamically
and personally
- RSS feeds enabling other sites to display your content
and link back to you
- Opt-in email newsletter publishing systems allowing
you to control the flow of information to prospects
and customers
- content syndication - distribution of your articles
to article directories and ezines
- e-commerce functionality and database development
- affiliate marketing
- joint ventures with other web businesses
- and last but not least, comprehensive statistics
about your site that will enable you to adjust your
site and its marketing to improve your return on investment.
If you want to generate more website traffic, please
get in touch. Incise is a web marketing company offering
traffic building and sales conversion services as well
as implementation of web site design, build and hosting.
You can call us on 01242 506 274.
To find out more, call us on +44(0)845
456 5342
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