A Website is not enough......

Many business people think their foray to online marketing is to have a website made and then that is it, and to be honest when I first started I thought the same thing, I thought the phone would ring off the hook and then........nothing. A single website on the internet is essentially a small fish in the ocean, there are things that need to be done to show people that fish!

A website is essential now days and you're missing out if you don't have one, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to get people 1. finding your site and then 2. Taking action and calling you.

There are now many ways that you an get people visiting your site, both offline and online, I'll be covering these in the blog over time, but here's an overview. 

A Google search page with PPC ads in the red boxes

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the fastest ways to get visitors to your site, when someone searches for something on a search engine they are shown results for that search term, as Google is the biggest search engine I'll use it for this example, at the top and right hand side of the page are the PPC ads (See pic). A company bids by setting the price they are willing to pay to be shown in those positions then when someone searches for those terms  lets say 'plumber in Hertford' and if they win the bid they'll then be shown in those positions, however the clever bit is that they won't pay a penny for that until someone clicks on their ad and goes through to their website. You can get PPC up and running within half an hour.

The results on the search page below the ads are the organic and Google Local listings, these are free but it takes work and time to get a site showing here and you need to have a half decent website again I'll cover what goes into a decent website in future posts. 

Other ways to get people viewing your site is to use social media, Facebook ads, article writing and blogging, submitting your site to directories.

Reciprocal links (you put a link to my site on your site and I'll do the same for you) can be okay but there is a little bit to be known about it, Google used to rank site based on how many links it had linking to it, we called these backlinks, however Google pretty much no longer does this, what I mean is if you had a link to your site say from the BBC site, Google would see your site as important and it would help,  there is no point in having reciprocal links to your site from a site that has nothing to do with your trade, also if you get a link from another site it's better if there is content on that page relevant to your business, so a page with Top 10 plumbing maintenance tips would be good if it then linked to a plumbers website.

Also you have all the offline methods of trying to drive people to your site, via ads, business cards, PR, flyers and so on.

Of course if you have a poor website then you will be wasting your time doing any of the above as people will come on to it and just think it's an unprofessional company and leave, I've also once seen a plumbers website before with absolutely no contact details on, which would have helped.


To your success
Paul