All over the internet you will find tips for growing your small business, and one of the most common tips is that you need to have a nice website for your customers. The website will attract traffic to the site and help you make sales, all while reducing the cost of doing business by eliminating the need for a brick and mortar location.
The problem is that too many companies relied on their website to do all of the heavy lifting for the business, and they are not getting the kind of return that they expected from their site. There are several other things that businesses have to do to ensure that they get the most from their website.
Google Analytics
One of the most important factors in running a business is making sure that you get a good return on the money that you spend. The cost of customer acquisition is high enough as it is, and when you fail to convert potential customers into paying customers, you are just wasting your money. A good tool to analyze traffic to your site and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns is the Google Analytics tool. This tool analyzes where site traffic comes from and helps you determine whether or not a particular marketing drive is yielding results. Google Analytics can also make your site stronger by using ads and pay-per-click networks to point more potential customers to your site. Unless you know how your site is doing and you can analyze your traffic, you are throwing your marketing money around blindly.
Search Engine Optimization
Another strategy that you need to consider for your business is search engine optimization, or SEO. When a customer searches for keywords associated with your site on Google or another major search engine, the rankings are shown based on the rank score that the site has. Customers generally will not go past the third page of results to find what they are looking for, and many will not go past the first page. Your site needs to be ranked as highly as possible, if you are going to attract customers. With a solid SEO strategy, you will build links to your site and create a strong web presence that potential customers will be able to see in a number of different places. Each time a strong back link is created, your site ranking increases and so does the visibility of your site. Beyond the investment in the site itself, SEO is one of the most important investments you can make for your company.
Social Media Marketing
Finally, a lot of the business that you can create for your company can be done through social media outlets. With hundreds of millions of users, sites like Facebook and Twitter keep customers connected with the businesses that they like and work as a viral network to spread information about your company. Say that you have a product that a customer really likes. If they hit the “like” or “share” button on that product page, the product page shows up on that customer’s Facebook news feed. Now all of the people who are on that customer’s friends list are exposed to your company, and you did not have to spend a dime on advertising. More importantly, the people who see your products are likely to be in your target demographics and are the most likely to become paying customers. You need to have someone in charge of making sure that your company is constantly engaged with customers via social media if you hope to compete in modern business. With the changes that have come to the business world over the last ten years it has been hard for some companies to keep up and compete. There are several things that you need to do to make sure that you are taking advantage of all the tools that the internet has to offer, and you need to stop believing that building a website is enough for an online company.
