As anyone with experience of the Internet knows, simply having a website is not enough. You need to be concerned with all aspects of website optimization too. We all know from browsing the web that a pretty site without content leaves us cold, and that the feeling of wasting our time will take us away from a site and the products or services offered there.
Whether you’re new to Internet marketing or you want to remind yourself of some essential facts, it’s worth taking a few minutes to read about the three steps involved in Internet marketing.Going back to the pretty site that leaves disappointed, you may have invested a lot of time and money in building a professional-looking site. But did you know that search engine optimisation is really the key to success? An expensive site that no one visits is, essentially, quite useless. Let’s take a look at the three steps.
Creating a Marketing Plan for Use on the Internet
The first thing that ought to be done when embarking on an Internet marketing project is to decide what you want and how much you can invest in order to get it. If your goal is to generate business by improving your customer base, you need to ask yourself how much each new customer is worth in order to get an idea of what your budget should be and how to manage it. Decide what you want new or potential customers to do when they eventually reach your site. To turn visitors into customers you’ll need to know your audience and also know how to appeal to them more than other sites offering a similar product or service. Think about ways of standing out in the largest (virtual) marketplace. Take a second look at websites that have succeeded in your eyes, and note the specific ways in which they’re successful. Similarly, there’s no shortage of poor sites to look at if you wonder about bad practise. Always remember that success means achieving good ranking with search engines.
Evaluate Your Site Or Site Design Objectively And Fix The Real Problems
Don’t make the mistake of becoming obsessed with relatively minor points related to style when you’re assessing your site. Look at it objectively, and in terms of the things that are really important. Will it attract visitors searching for your product online, through featuring keywords and other things that search engine optimisation experts advise. And the design or evaluation stage is really when you ought to be thinking seriously about employing a good team of search engine optimization experts. Many reputable search engine optimization specialists will offer a free search engine optimization analysis, during which various ways of improving your site can be discussed.
Don’t leave it too late to get good advice and never underestimate the importance of getting onto search engine results pages. They should give you advice on technical issues such as text files providing information to ‘robots’ sent by search engines and beneficial ways of linking. They should also advise you on good SEO Content Management Systems that will allow you to keep your site optimised for search engines as time goes on. There’s a sense in which it’s only after search engine optimisation that you can effectively turn visitors into customers by whatever means you’ve decided to employ.
Get to Know Your Visitors through Making Use of Web Analytics
After investing in good SEO and creating a site that represents your product or service to the best standards possible, you’ll want to see the fruits of your labour. You won’t be able to make good decisions about how to promote well unless you have some reliable information about patterns of behaviour among visitors to your site. As a business you’ll need to know the following:
• How many visitors come to your site?
• How are they finding you?
• What keywords are used when they search?
• Which pages are attracting the most interest?
• How many visitors are doing exactly what you would like them to in terms of your product?
Web analytics will help you to get all of this information. By discovering which stage of a checkout process is losing you the most visitors, or which pages are least popular, you can review the way things work and make improvements.
Conclusion
If you want to keep your eyes on the prize, you should never lose sight of these essentials of Internet marketing!
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