A Guide To Online Marketing

More business owners are discovering that having a beautiful web site is not enough. There is a big difference between having a pretty web site and one that brings in leads. How can you increase the number of leads generated from your web site?

There are two main steps to increase the number of potential customers that contact you from your web site. First, your web site needs to be easily found. Second, you need to give potential customers an incentive to contact you once they open your web site. We shall discuss each of these steps in detail…

How can your web site be easily found? This may be common sense, but you need to include your web site address in all of your marketing materials. Make sure your web site address appears everywhere including your company flyers, brochures, business cards, Yellow Pages ads, company cars, store windows… If you regularly correspond through e-mail with potential clients, create an e-mail signature with your web site address on it. In short, make your web address visible as much as possible.

The other part of making your web site visible is making it appear first on search engines. There are many search engines including Google, MSN / Bing, Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves…and hundreds more. However, most people search for businesses on Google. When a potential customer types in a keyword such as “hair salon Seattle” into a search engine, there are two types of results that appear. One is the paid advertising (known as paid-per-click or AdWords), and the other is the unpaid, natural, and organic search results. Research shows that 75% of potential customers click on the organic search results while only 25% click on the pay-per-click advertising.

So the question is: how can your web site get high rankings on the organic search results? Here are several tips. First, make sure you know what your customers are typing into Google. If you are a real estate agent in Seattle, chances are potential homebuyers won’t type your name into Google because they don’t know you yet. They will likely type keywords such as “Seattle real estate” or “Magnolia house” into Google. Know the keywords your customers type into search engines and optimize your web site for those keywords.

The next tip for search engine optimization (SEO) is to place a lot of original articles on your web site. Having lots of original content will help your web site’s ranking. Another tip is to optimize the underlying structure of your web site, including utilizing the proper keyword semantics, meta title, and description tags. Finally, work on obtaining the right links to your web site. Link building is one of the most important factors that will help or hurt your web site’s ranking. Having the right links will help your ranking while having the wrong ones can hurt your ranking. This is an area that SEO experts can assist you with.

When visitors finally come to your web site, you need to give them an incentive to provide you with their contact information. Perhaps you offer a free consultation, free e-book, free analysis, or free estimate. The incentive should be attractive enough for potential customers to contact you. By employing these Internet marketing strategies, you will increase the number of leads and sales generated from your web site.