Is your website delivering as many leads and new clients as you would like?
Every business today – whether large or small – has access to the techniques and tools to build an active online presence that attracts and retains clients. If you’re not taking advantage of them you’re practically giving business away to your competitors.
Minimally, every business should be doing the following:
- Search Engine Optimization. It gets your website found by people looking for you products or services.
- Social Media. It builds “mind share” – creating awareness of your business with clients and prospects.
- Reputation Management. It ensures that the online perception of your business is a good one.
Search Engine Optimization
Consider the following:
- The first 5 search results in Google get nearly 70% of all clicks
- 75% of local mobile searches result in a store visit within 24 hours
- There are over 3.5 billion google searches every day
SEO is about getting your company in front of people as they search for products and services. You might have an excellent website that can turn any visitor into a customer, but if people aren’t getting to the website that’s never going to happen.
SEO is a proactive, structured approach used to improve the position of your website in the search engine listings for the keywords and phrases that it should be found. So if you sell “left handed widgets”, and someone is searching for “left handed widgets”, your site comes up.
It is a cost-effective method of online marketing that can help you get new visitors, leads and sales.
There are some great tools available to help you with SEO that will continually track and analyze your website each month and provide step by step instructions for how to improve its search engine ranking. You can also hire experts in this field if it’s not something you want to do yourself.
Isn’t SEO a one time thing?
No! Besides the fact that you may have hundreds of competitors trying to get their websites to the top of the search results (and push yours down), Google often modifies the formulas by which they rank sites. They always want to be providing the best listings for people who are searching, and so they are always making changes to provide the best results. These changes can affect where your site shows up.
Social Media
Did you know that:
- People spend an average of 142 minutes on social media every day?
- 81% of all small and medium businesses use some kind of social platform?
- There are 3.5 billion active social media users?
Social media allows you to create awareness of your business, your products and your services – to gain “mind share” with clients and potential clients by being a regular part of their lives so if they have a need they think of you. The particular product or services you offer will determine which social media channels make sense, but they could be Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or any one of dozens of social media platforms.
There are some other great opportunities with social media that we wrote about here https://seethroughweb.com/how-to-increase-sales-with-social-media-marketing/
How is it Done?
Ideally with a plan. You set specific goals for your social media and then craft your campaigns to meet them. There are some great tools available to help you do this yourself; tools that will help you post, schedule posts (this is key – by being able to schedule posts you can plan out your social media weeks or months in advance), interact with clients and more. Of course, there are also companies you work with to do this for you.
Reputation Management
You want your business to look great when people are checking you out online.
These days:
- 88% of online shoppers consider online reviews when making a buying decision
- 80% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations
- 86% of people will hesitate to purchase from a business that has negative online reviews
Just like in our personal lives, if someone is saying something bad about us, we want to know about it, and conversely, if they were saying great things about us, we want to know about that too!
You need to ensure that online your company appears in the best possible light.
Reputation Management helps you listen to what people are saying about your business all over the web, whether that is on review sites, other websites, in social media, or anywhere they might be interacting. If what they are saying is great, you can thank them, if what they are saying isn’t so great, you hopefully work with them to resolve any problems or issues and hopefully get them to upgrade their review.
There are tools available to help you monitor and respond to comments, ensure that your business information is accurate everywhere online, and even help you to generate more positive reviews for your business. There are also companies that can look after this for you.
Conclusion
These 3 techniques are the basics that every business should be doing to generate more leads through their website; whether you do them yourself or you hire a firm to look after them for you. One thing is for sure, your competitors are trying to make sure their business gets found on the web, and if you’re not working at it as well you could be losing business to them.
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