When a question or need arises, the first place we all go is the Internet. It goes without saying then, that if you are a business, a website is required. Your website is your partner for sharing information about you, what you offer, providing assistance, allowing people to do business with you, making you available to them 24/7, 365 days a year. To add some perspective, here are some stifling statistics. There are more than 2.2 billion people online – a number that only gets bigger over time. There are over 900 million sites on the Internet, and thousands more are added every day – that is a lot of websites! With those kinds of volumes, you can see that “build it and they will come” is a notion that only works if you can be found.
Your website is your #1 most valuable marketing tool for your business – all roads that you use to promote your business should somehow lead back to your website. That said, there are things you can do to make your business more visible and get visits to your website. Here are some simple but helpful ways attract prospects to your website, in other words, your business:
1. Business Cards, Letterhead, and Email: Is your website on your business cards, brochures, and on your letterhead? Is your website address in the signature of your email?
2. Call to Action: Give people a reason to visit your website. For instance, on the back of your business card, ask them to visit your website to claim a free report, sign up for your newsletter, get a discount on a service – anything that grabs their interest and allows them to check out what you have to offer. Why, you say? Unless people have an immediate need for your product or service, they won’t call you or they won’t have your card handy when the need does arise. However, if they have been to your site, they know what you are all about and you will be the first, or one of the first businesses that come to mind when they are ready to buy or engage with you.
3. Update your Website on a Regular Basis: Search engines like Google and Bing will pay more attention to your website if there are regular changes. If nothing changes in a while, your website will slip down the list because the search engines consider it as no longer active.
4. Be Social: If your business is on social media, fantastic! Take every opportunity on your social media networks to point people to your website. Just on Facebook, you can expand those you influence by 50-200% via friends of fans (FactBrowser). LinkedIn and Google Places for Business need to know your business exists.
5. Optimize Your Site with SEO: As we discussed in our June 2016 newsletter, website optimization is important to stay relevant in the eyes of the search engines like Google and Bing so that you appear at the top when people come looking for your business.
Feel like you don’t have the time to figure out which strategies are best for your business, let alone staying on top of it on a regular basis? Let us do the heavy lifting – as your business partner, we want you to be successful and would love to help. Give us a jingle today.
