The importance of marketing your new website
It is a common misconception to assume:
“if you build it, they will come”
A website will require marketing as much as any new product or service.
A new website is like a shop, in a field, with no roads or passing trade. The challenge is get people to visit your shop.
The first step is to build roads to your shop – roads are links in the world of the internet – the more you have, the easier it is to find your website. The first road to connect your shop to civilisation is from the search engines, Google is the M25 of roads.
Once you have some roads, you need to add some signs, or adverts in the case of the web.This includes search engine results, pay-per-click advertising and offline advertising. The more sign posts you have the more traffic you are likely to get.
The first and most important sign-post is your search engine result page listing (SERP). This generally uses text from your page meta data – normally your meta title and meta description. If no meta description is available it will show a snippet from the page text. Your meta data is one of the most aspects important search engine optimisation – it needs to do the following:
- Include your keywords/key phrases
- Be unique on all pages – helps search engines identify useful content
- Be compelling – you want people to click your link, so it has to sell or include a call to action
Other sign posts include:
- Pay-per-click advertising – Google Adwords
- Banner advertising on relevant websites
- Offline adverts in local papers, magazines, bill boards etc
Do not under-estimate the power of traditional printed adverts – targeted to the right audience, they can provide excellent traffic.
Once you have visitors to your website you will need to consider what is required to convert them to paying customers – are you making the most of your traffic. There is no point paying for advertising if your website does not convert them to customers.
Our next post will cover some tweaks and changes you can make to your website to increase conversions.