You’ve done all this work to set up an awesome new website that is the result of careful and tactical planning, but did you consider how people will find you? Even the most beautiful and best performing website will fail if people can’t find it, so you need to include visitor acquisition strategy as part of your initial website planning. Further, you should consider how you will keep your visitors’ attention once you bring them in, and this is where external community presences on social networks and business directories come in.
It’s important to consider the following when planning how you will get visitors to your website, and keep them coming back:
How will people search for me?
We use search engines every day, but how many of us understand exactly how they work? While you won’t need to understand the ins and outs of indexing websites on search engines, you will need to have an idea of how you can rank highly for the keyword set (or search terms) relating to your business.
Keywords:
Think of the words you type in when you use search engines. If you want to find a local movie theatre, you’d likely search for “movie theatre [YOUR CITY NAME HERE]” or for an Italian restaurant, “Italian food near me”.
These are the types of words you want to have appear on your site the most and they are referred to as your keywords. While keyword strategy is a topic all on its own, the basics can be broken down like this:
- Consider how you would search for your website? What terms would you use?
- Perform keyword research to identify additional keywords and keyword sets/phrases that you may not have thought of using tools like:
- Once you identify your keywords, you’ll want to use them often throughout your site. Also, ensure your developer stuffs all website metadata with the same keywords. Metadata refers to pieces of code built into your website to describe the images, videos, links, and other non-text elements displayed throughout the site.
Where do I want them to discover me?
Your website is great, but you need to get people through that virtual door, and unfortunately, very few of them are going to come directly to your website – you need them to discover you.
The idea of making your website and content discoverable is incredibly important as it’s likely the main reason you’re on the web. If done right, your discoverability tactics can vastly set you apart from your competition in terms of:
- Who finds you on search engine results;
- Who follows you closely and sees your updates often; and
- Ultimately, who thinks of you first when considering a purchase in your business category.
Social Media:
Whatever your feelings about the social networks themselves, you can’t deny the marketing power they provide to small businesses. Truly, for small and medium-sized businesses with limited marketing budgets, the opportunity to reach a local, targeted audience and have them follow you so they don’t miss any update you post is a game-changer. It’s just important that you’ve positioned yourself on the right social networks, and that you’ve built your social media presences so that they drive traffic to your website.
While there is a long list of social media networks that you should research and determine if they make sense for your marketing plan, every business should at least create presences across the big three:
Does it feel like a lot to manage all of these profiles and handles? It is! The good news is that there are a plethora or tools that you can use to schedule posts, and post to all handles at once. Some of these solutions include HootSuite, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social.
Business Directory Listings:
Much like your social media profiles, listings on business directories serve as complimentary digital properties where people can discover your business – and many are free, so you really do not want to miss out.
As previously mentioned in Lesson 2, you want to take advantage of local, nationwide, and niche business directories available through networking groups, business development organizations, and local media, but you also need to focus on using these tools to retain your audience’s attention. This can be accomplished via:
- Regular updates about business offerings and operations
- Exclusive deals for those who discover you via social media or directory listings
- Fun, conversational content that humanizes your business
How will I track everything?
If you’re taking the time to draw all these visitors your way, you’re certainly going to want a way to track your efforts. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to track the volume of visits to your site, how people find you, and their behaviors once they are on your site – and many of the most powerful tools are free.
Google Analytics for your website
Google Analytics is a free program that you can (and should) add to your website to track your website traffic and visitor behavior. Data explaining where your visitors are coming from, where they are located geographically, which of your pages they are viewing, and how long they are spending on pages is important to know, and it can all be gained easily with Google Analytics. To learn more and find out how to add Google Analytics to your website, click here.
Social Media analytics
In addition, you’ll want to ensure your social media activities are providing you a return on your time and possibly monetary investment. The major social media platforms include their own analytics platforms that will illustrate how many people your posts reach and how many people interacted with them. Social media analytics tools will also track changes to number of people that follow you and provide information on where those people are located geographically.
SEO Tools
SEO is a competition, and you’re going to want to keep an eye on your score – that’s where SEO tools come in and they can be massively helpful. Utilize these tools to run regular audits of your website so you can identify areas in need of improvement, opportunities, and what’s working well. With this data coming in on a regular basis (and it’s not hard to obtain), you’ll have the knowledge necessary to constantly improve your digital marketing process.
Bonus Tip: Accessibility, for very good reason, has become an important factor in search engine ranking scores lately, so it is important to be certain that your website is accessible to anyone, regardless of their abilities. Keep in mind that people with visual and mobility disabilities may visit your site, so you want to ensure they have as good an experience as anyone else. For more on website accessibility, visit W3C Schools introduction on website accessibility here.
To evaluate your website’s SEO grade and accessibility, you can use any of the following paid and free tools:
So, there you have it! You’ve carefully and strategically planned your website, chosen a platform, registered a domain and found a hosting provider, designed the site, and ensured that people can find you! At this point, you should feel confident that you’ve done everything you can to set your business up for success on the Internet.
However, Digital Marketing is a complicated topic, and this series has just covered the tip of the iceberg. There are many ongoing considerations that you must keep in mind even after your website goes live, and for more information on those, be sure to stay tuned to LenovoPRO Community for future Digital Marketing 101 lessons!
Is there a digital marketing topic you’d like to learn more about? Leave your suggestions in the comments and we may cover them in future Digital Marketing lessons.
Have questions about this lesson or any of the others from this series? Ask in the comments to start a discussion!