Owning A Website Is Not Online Marketing
Posted on October 29, 2007 - Filed Under Marketing Strategies
I am amazed at the number of corporations that think having a cool or sexy website with great flash animations and a contact form translates to great presence on the Internet. I might then ask the question: Are you building your site to impress people with how pretty it is, or to build serious traffic and generate income?
FYI, the web design companies who are persuading you that a fully flash website is the best way to elevate your online branding and image, are raking in the money for developing the flash applications while you are set to losing tons of traffic as search engines stay away from flash sites. So while you may have a beautiful site, no one will be able to find you, unless you are already a well known global brand like Nike or Coca-cola.
Having a website with user-friendly navigation that takes less than three seconds to load shows that you are a modern forward looking company who are customer oriented. Still, you need to ensure that it is not displaying outdated content, and the lack of recent news or product / service updates can seriously affect your online branding and image. They are more damaging to your image than not having a stunning web design with all the bells and whistles installed. Also, how easy is it for your customers to find you on the World Wide Web? Apart from those who know your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) or web address, can clients who are trying to find you for a product or service they require arrive at your site via a keyword search on Google or Yahoo?
Along the same train of thought, has your site been optimized for search engine bots? Do you know what keyword searches you are losing out to competitors on? Are you able to track the effectiveness of online promotions / advertising via the number of hits on your site? How about your page ranking? How does that work? I am not the first to say this, and will not be the last, that paid advertising on Google does not guarantee you top spot in a search. I will talk more about this in a later post.
Whether you have the answers to the questions above is what separates a company that has online marketing program from one that has not. Below is a checklist to see if you have a marketing program in place:
1. Have you optimized your site for Search Engine searches?
2. Is your site submitted to major search engines for inclusion of indexing in their directories?
3. Have you added meta tags that is reflective of the keywords you want potential customers to find you by?
4. Are you trading web link with your business affiliates / partners?
5. Do you update your site content at least once a week or fortnight?
6. Are you tracking your hit stats after every online promotion or event for understanding the needs of your customers?
7. Do you have a regular newsletter going out to customers for building loyalty and for them to forward to friends? Is there a short blurb of your company products / services in each issue of the newsletter?
9. Are you tracking what your customers are clicking on to analyze their area of interest, and sending them targetted communications at their particular area of interest? To do this, you will need to have a customer database integrated with a subscription list management system.
10. Are you responding to online enquiries within 24 hours? If not, you might want to consider setting up a lead generation and tracking system as potential customers will move on to your competitors if they are not getting any replies from you. Worse yet, they will not come back to your site.
11. Do you have a forum or extranet for customer support?
12. Do you own a company blog?
13. Do you regularly check your PageRank following the release of a newsletter, a promotion or updated content on your site?
14. Do you monitor your top keyword searches to target your online marketing at?
15. Do you have an online advertising program and monitoring the ROI gained from these sites?
These some basic questions that are easy enough to set up and if done right, can lead you to a rapidly climbing Page Rank with corresponding numbers in new leads.
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3 Responses to “Owning A Website Is Not Online Marketing”
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This post is really useful. It is talking about saving precious time while doing business.The 15 point guidelines are really thought provoking.Good job mate.
The author has come out with some interesting tips to make sure that we are heading in the right track.Flashy websites are sheer misleading tactics and are not true profit making strategies.
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