Like a classic car, your website requires constant love and attention. Get it right, and it demands attention.

This guide will give you tips on how best to develop your website, ideas on improving its effectiveness and some great advice on how to promote your business. To market, promote and generate traffic to your website takes a broad range of skills and a variety of different solutions. Help your site grow – let’s go through the logical steps in your website journey.

5 areas that get your website working for you:

OPTIMISE – your site

• Optimise your site’s content in a structured way.
• Help search engines identify the relevance of your pages.
• Identify keywords based on search volume.
• Balance keyword targeting with usability and user experience.

Everybody wants to be number one on Google. The reality is, it requires a large ongoing budget and significant resource. Laying the foundations for a search engine friendly site should be your starting point if you’re serious about the future rankings of your website. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is complex and ever changing. Put very simply, it’s about relevance and authority. Relevance, or on-page SEO, is all about whether search engines can find information on your site that is relevant to the user’s search term. Authority, or off-page SEO, is how much search engines trust your website and determines where you rank. The rules for both are varied and complex. They change regularly according to the search engine and its algorithms. There are no quick wins. But you can start by making your site relevant to what your audience is searching for.

PROMOTE – think about the following ways to promote your site

GOOGLE ADWORDS

• Research the market’s keyword demand to learn which to target.
• Longtail keywords may produce less traffic but they can convert better.
• Measure your success. By seeing which ads get clicked and which don’t, you’ll see where to invest.

EMAIL MARKETING

• Email marketing is something that should be done regularly.
• Use with other forms of online and offline marketing to maximise return.
• Use campaign specific landing pages on your website to test their effectiveness.

PRINT & DIRECT MAIL With the emergence of different online media for promoting your business, offline marketing still offers some of the best return on your investment. Mail shots, handouts and magazine inserts are just some of the ways offline marketing can get in front of your customers. EXHIBIT Emphasise your message. Use large eye-catching displays. Make the most of your next exhibition and show yourself off!

ENGAGE – with your visitors

• Start building brand advocates with likeable and shareable content.
• Pick up the phone and talk to your clients or engage with them at networking events.
• Regularly write and publish blog articles.

To win in web, you have to be there whenever your consumer needs you, to listen to the things they like and to react to the things they don’t. It’s all about the ‘micro-moments’. Potential customers will need to engage with your business across lots of different channels and devices before taking the next step. You need to be ready to connect with them in whatever medium they want to communicate. Engaging can build lifelong customers. So what are the routes to engagement for your business? Being present on social media channels is the first step. Facebook helps you show off the good things you do, Twitter helps you listen to your target demographic, answer questions and join relevant conversations.

MONITOR – know what’s going on

• Add tracking codes to email campaigns.
• Create specific landing pages for social media coupons and printed marketing offers.
• Monitoring activity can help you react accordingly and get the best return on your investment.

REACT – when you know what’s going on, you can address it accordingly…

• Continually improving your customer journey can mean increases in your conversion rates.
• A 30-50% bounce rate and at least 2 minutes average time on site are good goals to strive for.
• Look for the keywords that are performing best and then add more content and pages to your website that targets these keyword phrases.

If you need help with any of the above, and more information on Optimising your website, Promoting your Website, Engaging with your Customers, how to monitor your website’s activities, social media management, call us Nettl of Kidderminster | Pixel Design to arrange an appointment. 01562 747411