No matter how good your product or how advanced your website you need to attract visitors before you will make sales. Actively driving traffic to your website is an essential part of operating a website.
Natural search rankings and keywords
Most visitors to your website will find their way to your website through a Search Engine. In our experience up to 90% of your visitors will find your site via a Search Engine. For this reason it is important that you spend time managing and refining the copy on your website, your META tags and ensure you regularly update with new products or news items. These are key to increasing and maintaining your website's rank in the natural search results.
Search engines will visit your website and rank it in terms of how relevant it thinks your site is to searches that are performed. This means it is essential to think about what keywords your customers are likely to use when searching for your products or services. If these keywords are mentioned in the Title and Description META tags, in a Heading tag at the top of your page and a few times in the first few paragraphs on the page you will increase your chances of ranking highly for those terms and thus being found by potential customers.
Search Engine Optimisation [SOE] is a vast field with constantly changing boundaries but you have to start with the basics and covering the above is an excellent start.
Pay for results
Paying a search engine to be included is the only way to guarantee you will be listed in that particular Search Engine's search results. Natural listings are the Search Engine's best guess at which websites are relevant to a particular search term. With Pay Per Click you can guarantee that your website will be listed along with your chosen text. Each time someone clicks your advert it will cost you. When you bid on a particular phrase or keyword and agree to pay a set amount to the Search Engine each time someone clicks your advert. The more you are prepared to pay, the higher up the list of sponsored links you will appear. Sponsored links typically appear above or to the right of the natural listings.
It is important to spend time selecting which words or phrases you wish to appear for, too generic and you will appear for searches that are not entirely related to your products, too specific and the volume of searches might not be high enough to generate any visitors. For example, someone searching for Vauxhall Astra might be looking for a review of the car, replacement parts, a car to hire, insurance or any number of other items so paying to be found for Vauxhall Astra is not likely to attract a targeted group of visitors. It is important not to waste advertising spend by attracting someone who is looking for something different to what you are actually offering. So if you are selling Winter Car Covers for a Vauxhall Astra you should consider using more refined terms such as Vauxhall Astra Cover, Buy Vauxhall Astra Car Cover, Custom Cover for Vauxhall Astra etc.
Other online channels
eBay, Craig's List and BT Tradespace offer other methods that may be suitable for marketing your products depending on what you are selling and who your target market is. eBay for example provides an immediate route to putting your product in front of a large audience although you must also consider their fees, image and type of users.
Referrals may be a suitable way to gain new business particularly if you work closely with another company that you already share customers with. If they link to you from their website it is generally a good thing in Search Engine ranking terms and visitors send from them will generally be of mind to trust you.
Finally
The most important channel that will drive traffic to your website is you. Make sure you use every opportunity to promote your website from company stationery, email signatures, collecting email addresses in store to printed adverts. The more you promote your website address the more visitors you will attract.
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