It may sound slightly rhetorical, but is your actual business offering directly reflected in your website? I ask this for one main reason…. if you have outsourced the production of your website, designers do have the ability to work to their own schedule and their own intuition. When this happens, the original brief may well have swayed away from your own intention. It morphs from being a business proposal into a design brief.
Content within your site that is ‘flowery‘ and not truly reflective of your business will not assist your search engine presence either. The old adage ‘Content is King!‘ applies to your search positioning – ensure the information on your homepage, especially the terminology, is relevant to your potential customers. Google and similar search engines, rank your site dependent on a wide range of criteria. Included within this is the content matching of search terms used by search engine users and the content within your site. Whilst a site packed full of images and aesthetics may be pleasing on the eye, it may not necessarily work for your search engine rankings.
Make sure that the ‘who‘, ‘what‘, ‘why‘, ‘when‘ and ‘where‘ of your business are immediately visible to the first time user.
Secondly, segment the marketing of your business and that of your service.
This is your moment to view your site from the most important aspect of them all – not yours, not google’s, but your customers… analyse your business from the perspective of your site user… ask yourself how are web users ‘going to find us?’ Begin to build a database of relevant key terms and key phrases which apply to your business and then those that apply to your service. As an example, you own a florist in Bedfordshire. Is your preferred site visitor the user searching for ‘flowers’, searching for ‘buy flowers’ or ‘buy flowers in Bedford’? Set your Search Engine Ranking objectives using terms that matter to your customer – don’t let your ego be drawn into competitive terms that offer little relevance to your customer – it won’t add to your online revenues, it will simply detract from your own time and energies.
Developing what is termed a ‘long tail search strategy’ approach allows you to develop a keyword database which can be actively used within your PPC activity, but it also allows you to ensure your homepage and content pages include the necessary terminology which receives the virtual ‘thumbs up’ from the main search engines. Longtail terms aren’t simply phrases made up of a range of related words – they’re niche products, niche services where the competition is less, but the relevance is high.
To run a truly effective online marketing campaign and to reach out to your customers you must know your business. This knowledge must be reflected in all aspects of your online strategy to ensure you drive optimal and relevant visitors to your site.
