Marketing your website

Your biggest task when marketing your website is to get traffic to your site. From there the site should be built in such a way that it converts traffic into users or buyers.

FACT: 70% of traffic to your site will come from search engines.

As such, your first job should be to get ranked on search engines. Make sure that you submit your website to Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Next you should get onto as many directories as possible. This could become an expensive exercise as the larger, more popular ones will charge you for a listing. However, it is valuable because the more links you have to your site the better your search engine ranking will be.

FACT: Google ranks your website based on links coming to your site. The better the ranking of a site with a link to you, the more valuable the link is for your website ranking.

Now you can start to market the site in order to drive non search engine traffic. Add the website address to all email signatures, letterheads, invoices, compliments slips or any other method of correspondence.

FACT: If you show a benefit to using your site then you will see an increase in traffic. So, make it clear what the user will gain from using your site.

During the marketing process you should consider using banner adverts and Google ad words to drive more traffic.

Banners will work well if you target them to the right users. Place banner on websites with the same target audience as yours. Make sure the banner has a good call to action and it tells the user why they should visit your site.

Google ad words work well if you buy the right keywords and put a budget in place.

Even though marketing is traditionally seen as a separate practice to website content creation and website building, it should all be fed by the same goal. Therefore you should let the marketing guys write a lot of the website content, as they understand selling text and keywords better than traditional writers.

FACT: Watch out, though. Google understands that users want good information, not a site filled with keywords. It will rank you lower if it perceive’s you to use too many keywords and not enough natural text.

Also let your marketing department work on your home page. The text here needs to show exactly what you do, how it benefits the client and have a call to action.

FACT: If a user is not impressed within 3 seconds of being on your website then he will click the back button and be gone, so make sure your home page is the best page on your site.