Increasing the visibility of a website involves creating a good online product in the eyes of your target market and making sure it is SEO friendly and Mobile Responsive. Social Media channels are a great way to leverage your website promotion efforts and get more target market visitors onto your site.
Beat The Odds With Good Website Marketing Planning
How to get noticed on the web is a question that crosses everyone’s mind the moment they are the owner of a website. While having a website in today’s competitive market is a must for every single professional organisation, it will do little good if you don’t attract good volumes of targeted website traffic. The odds are all stacked against you as there are more than a billion websites on the Internet and hundreds or thousands across some specific business categories.
A Combination Of Promotion Tools
If you are in a highly competitive business area you would have to trawl your way through years of online promotion and competition. So how do you improve your odds of making your website a success and increase your visibility? There is no single nugget of wisdom here that will make your website a hit unfortunately, but a number of individual measures can collectively go a long way in giving you the exposure that your business needs. Here are some best practices that help your website get noticed in the midst of real online competition.
Start With A Good Website
The genesis of high visibility on the web lies in a good website base. Unattractive web design, copied content and poor functionality are the enemy to high visibility and good search engine rankings. If you have a bad website product it will do little good for your brand reputation online even if you are able to attract web traffic to your website. So you must start with a good website core and hire the services of a website design agency that has a proven track record in web design projects.
Grab The Readers Attention
They would develop your site from scratch or redesign your existing website to create a product that works well in the face of competition from your most successful competitors. The site must be unique in its design and be attractive to look at as this will register in the minds of website visitors and increases the percentage of returning users. The site must also be easy to use and a PC and on smart phones. Web visitors must be able to access the info they want with ease.
Take Time With Your Website Content Preparation
Spend some time preparing your page content too because your website visitors will be reading it. Make sure it is well written and you have all the associated photos that you need. Video is a favorite website material now with most audiences so ask your suppliers if they have any video that you could use or perhaps see if you can get a cost-effective piece of video made for you.
Search Engine Optimization
It is estimated that 70-80% of fresh traffic to any website comes via the search engines and these figures are even more the case of start-ups as they haven't any core base of clients at the start. If your website isn’t search engine friendly you stand to lose out on the bulk of potential traffic. Hence building a SEO friendly site should be top of the list for your web designer. Ask them to show you SEO friendly, mobile friendly websites that they have built in the past and ask them to explain everything to you.
Keeping Up To Date
The SEO friendly website build for the web design company involves writing clean code that attracts the search engine crawlers, captivating content for the website visitors and the search engines, website sitemap submissions and avoiding any and all practices that are red flagged by Google and other search engines. The Search Engine algorithms keep changing regularly and your web designer agency needs to make sure that they follow the latest conventions.
Work On The 'On-Site' And 'Off-Site' SEO
That is the 'on-site' side of SEO. On the 'off-site' side of SEO you need SEO optimisation done too and your web agency can help you with that. The 'off-site' seo will take some months to start to embed itself into the google search rankings so it is a medium term marketing strategy. From day one of your new website you could chat to your web agency about Adwords which will have you at the top of page 1 on Google from day 1 while your SEO work is just starting.
Captivating Content
We mentioned in a previous point that good content was important but this definitely deserves another mention. The content on your website isn’t meant to just fill empty space or to showcase your literary skills. It has to deliver a strong, informative message on what your business stands for, what are its USPs (Unique Selling Points) and what separates you from your rivals.
Make The Website Content Easy To Consume
Do not test the patience of your audience with long paragraphs of text that are hard to understand. Make the content crisp and to the point and make it 'speak' to the target market. Fresh and unique content also improves your SEO score with Google and you can even start a blog that provides you with the opportunity to regularly post fresh content and interact with your users.
The best websites are the ones that regularly add new content for Google to chew on and for website visitors to consume. You can do this in a blog or by adding new news pages or new product pages.
Mobile Responsive Website
According to the latest website statistics for Ireland the share of mobile traffic is above 50%. Mobile traffic has witnessed almost 1000 times increase compared to figures of 2009. This obviously shows the shifting trend among Internet users – from PC based website visitors to smart phone visitors. Thus you need to have a mobile responsive website that offers an engaging and easy to use website experience.
PC Users and Smart Phone Users Are Very Different Users
Bear in mind too that the smart phone device is quite different to the PC. The website visitors in both instances are often in different browsing modes and different locations so they often need different information. For example, in a lot of cases the mobile user may want the 'overview' where they PC visitor may want more information. Photos have to be optimised to display perfectly and clearly for smaller smart phone device screens and font sizes may need to be larger on mobiles.
Your web design company can go through all of these issues with you when you're preparing your website content.
Spread The Word
Some street businesses in certain parts of the world would use their lung power to attract the attention of the passing customers – and on the web you need to do something similar by using Social Media. Make sure that you create a strong presence in the different platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Pinterest. These allow you to actively engage with your audience and also gain from viral promotion.
Get Busy On Social Media
You can promote your products, services and brands in a very informal way on social media where users can spread the word for you. With social media you also do need to adhere to the good content rules we mentioned above. The social media audience like compelling content too so you need to grab their attention and show them something of interest and show them how to get more information from your business.
These are a few simple ways in which you can promote your business online. Remember you need the services of a professional web design agency that adheres to the above best practice and prepares a carefully planned strategy and methodically executes it.
About Author: MyIT is an experienced web design company in Dublin that has witnessed the shifting trends in the web design industry in the last 15 years. If you want to discuss any of the above with an excellent web team please call 01-6216866 or email info@myit.ie .
