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If you're planning a website or have one that isn't
delivering results, you must invest in website traffic
promotion. Otherwise your site will languish, lonely
and ignored in the virtual underworld.
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 over 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 traffic 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 websites 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 in your promotion planning
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 promotion. 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 promotion relies very heavily on
testing and measuring every aspect of your traffic 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 traffic
promotion strategy. With over 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 promote 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, Incise sees
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 website traffic promotion
plan 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 promotion company offering
traffic building and sales conversion services as well
as implementation of web site design, build and hosting.
You can call us on 01453 873638.
To find out more, call us on +44(0)845
456 5342
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