Doing Website Marketing For Your Small Business
So You want to do website marketing and be successful online with your small business website. Let us look at what your up against.
According to recent research, 93% of all online experiences begin with a search engine, and 75% of users never scroll to page 2.
There are lots of small businesses who don’t know anything about their domain and page authority surrounding their websites with many ignoring how to improve their domain and page authority. This is an important step towards being seen as a trusted resource in your niche.
How Will You Go About Marketing Your SME Website?
Not enough smaller businesses blog and don’t do it regularly enough. If your business did more keyword research you would find that this alone generates enough topics for you to create pages around keyword terms your target market are likely to be using to search for what you offer.
Do You Know Your Industry Inside Out and Have You Created Sufficient Website Landing Pages.
Once you know your industry inside out and have created sufficient pages to turn your website into a magnet you are on your way to beating the competition.
What you want to try and achieve is have Your Business and Your Website being seen as the go to guys.
Not every click will lead to a sale but the value you bring as an authority voice via your blog is an opportunity you cannot afford to miss.
Long tail keyword research is the key towards improving your blog. Long tail keywords might not have huge volumes of searches carried out monthly, but collectively if you target sufficient amounts of these keyword terms through blog topics, and within your content, signpost the reader through to your goal value page, this will over time bring improvements to those pages that matter on your website. It is important to know that long tail keywords make up about 70% of all searches done.
Small business owners with websites forget they are in the minor league and are not going to reach formula 1 within a few weeks or even a year from when they launch their website. But this unfortunately is what small business owners expect, and without spending any money on marketing.
Quality Backlinks with descriptive anchor text are still your priority but small business owners struggle to achieve getting them without help. Going back to what was said about blogging on your website and guest posting on other sites are still a key route in getting these backlinks. But even commenting on other forums and doing some social media also helps.
Depending on your type of business have you submitted your site to the likes of Facebook, Yelp, Thomson Local, FourSqaure and more, which are all important places to get listed.
Did you know that with your Yelp profile it could outrank your website for certain keywords?
How much use are you making of Google+?
With Google+ you can show off the reviews you get and provide information about your products and services. You can write a snippet on your Google+ page and provide a backlink to your blog article or right onto one of your websites goal pages.
Revisit Your Website Content Strategy
Let’s start with how prominent is your website blog?
Do you actually have a blog and does it have a clear link in your menu so visitors to your site can find it?
There are some people out there that will simply promote that you must be doing more Content Marketing and just simply focus on live channels like Twitter and Facebook. But there is still a huge amount of businesses in the SME sector that simply don’t have time or the creative writing streak within them to carry this out. And if you are in this group, then you really have to consider who is going to support your Web Marketing Strategy? To remain competitive you are going to need help to create that content, and do all the other tasks that come with Search Marketing to increase your visibility.
Are You Researching Your Competitors Websites?
It is important to research your competition – but where do you begin?
Without doubt if you are a small medium enterprise you are going to have to make use of a number of tools to achieve this objective. But guaranteed, if you are an SME business reading this, you won’t do competitor analysis – WHY?
Because from experience in having engaged with many small business owners you don’t have time. You are to busy running your business, and more than likely you don’t have the tools. Even if you did have the right tools you did not set out to be an analyst and know what to do with the data generated by these tools.
Some great marketers will simply write lots of stuff and say to you the SME business owner who finds their content that you will be surprised by what you find by doing competitor analysis. REALLY? Yes its true I’d say – You Would. But being blunt, an SME with a website trying to do this on their own is more than likely not going to know what your looking for, WHY?
Because your full time job did not have you set out to be an internet marketer. This is like dreaming – Yeh – I dreamt I fixed my own BMW – it was not difficult at all – nothing to it really!! YEH RIGHT!! Get the picture?
Are You Still Doing DIY Internet Marketing?
A book I think is yet to be written about Website Marketing The Failures and Why. And there would be a big chapter around DIY Internet Marketing.
Right now, there are great books out there such as Internet Marketing An Hour A Day that I suggest everyone should read.
And there are some other really good books, you should consider reading if you were to tackle doing DIY Internet Marketing such as Don’t Make Me Think.
The content of these and many other great books are based around sharing stories and methodologies of small medium businesses who did Internet Marketing – effectively.
And you will find more importantly that most of these stories talk about the website business owners actually throwing some money at their internet marketing strategy to make money and be successful at Website Marketing.
The books will contain stories about the in-house marketing people that were working hard, possibly full time doing web marketing. What was key is that they invested Time | Resource | Knowledge | Budget into their internet marketing.
But I have seen lots of small businesses who came forward with great ideas and insisted on doing DIY Internet Marketing and are no longer in business. Those people who insist there is nothing to marketing and were so great at doing their own marketing but failed maybe should have applied equations like Porters 5 Forces Model which demonstrates how competition influences every industry and market. But I am afraid to say that many small business website owners don’t do all of these things, instead they follow a DIY Web Marketing strategy that says they simply must be number 1 for a keyword term. This is a recipe for disaster.
How to Gain Good Search Engine Ranking Results
It is not impossible to gain good search engine ranking results for your niche, but there is lots to do. You just need to watch Dagon’s Den and them say to budding entrepreneurs most of whom have come from a small medium business background to be prepared to work hard, be focused and get the help of a professional.
Internet Marketing involves lots of elements from page design, creating focused and detailed content, spending sufficient time doing long tail keyword research, knowing your competitor and I am going to add, get to know your CMS (Content Management Software) Platform inside out. Do you know what features your CMS must have to assist with creating great goal landing pages? Will you know how to use the CMS to achieve conversions from those landing pages? And who is going to craft those pages to achieve the goals? Leaving it all to your web developer could be fatal. What is their marketing success track record?
From Submariner to Internet Marketing Practitioner Hunting The Competitor
People reading this who know me can recall that I spent 22 years in Submarines as one of the Command Team in the Submarine’s Control Room. What was learnt from my time spent there was to Know Your Enemy. Because, that is the first step to defeating it. The job under the water was constant analysis, working out the tactics based on the intelligence gathered.
Learning Google Analytics
When was the last time you as a small business owner looked at your Google Analytics to see if your website marketing is working for you?
Would you know what your looking for whilst you are busy say, selling furniture, or offering financial services, or providing services like plumbing, or Joinery, or you have some fantastic products to sell – but you just don’t know why your pages are not performing. The answer to the first question is that small business owners hardly look at their Google Analytics or even know whether the tracking code has been applied to the website. And the answer to the second question would be NO. Because Small Business Owners are no more interested in sitting for hours pouring over analytical data than I am trying to lay floorboards or fitting a heating system.
So, each to their own. And if you want to have a successful website and not waste lots of time following the DIY Website Marketing route, then seek professional help.
The evidence of failed website design and Website Marketing projects I can guarantee is all around you just like other types of projects you have witnessed. Such as that unfinished extension, that project car you were going to restore still sitting there half done – 5 years later. Walls torn down in your property but didn’t see the finished dream of having more space. And a lot of the time it was down to either lack of knowledge or too busy doing the things you are good at.