Marketing a new business today means doing more than putting advertisements in local papers and magazines.
The Internet has revolutionized how businesses interact with their potential customers as well as their current ones. If you do not focus on online marketing strategies from the beginning, your business immediately gets left behind.
Did you know there are more than 100 million active websites on servers in the United States alone?
How can you make sure yours appears under the right searches? You need a winning website strategy to guarantee potential customers can find you and your products or services.
Check out the 5 essential website strategies below for a great baseline on how to build a winning website for your business.
5 Essential Website Strategies for a Winning Business
Your business needs a great website no matter what items you produce or the services you provide. Use these website design and marketing strategies to make the most of your online presence.
1. Decide What Kind of Website You Need
The first step in building a winning website is to figure out what kind of site your business needs. Do you plan to have customers shop for things online through your site? Or do you simply want it to act as a digital business card?
Want the former? Then you need to take extra time and care to build a fully functioning website that’s easy to use for your customers.
You may not possess the skills necessary to create a complex site, but there are many companies out there that do. Look out for a knowledgeable web design company that’s willing to work closely with you to build a site that hits your goals.
Need the latter? Then you can always try using a drag-and-drop builder to create a website on your own.
Using existing frameworks like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, or Shopify, help you get a website set up fast. It also leaves you more money to invest in SEO, Google Ads, and other marketing strategies.
2. Invest in SEO
After you decide the kind of website your business needs, you need to start building a site that incorporates search engine optimization (SEO). Most small business owners and non-marketing people do not understand SEO and how it works. But SEO is vital to the success of any digital marketing strategy.
SEO helps boost your website’s visibility by driving more traffic to your website from search engine results pages on Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Each search engine has different rules for SEO. But all of them use things like keywords, content, and backlinks to rank your pages.
Keeping track of these different rules can pose a big challenge when you already have so much else going on. That’s where investing in an SEO consultant or marketing firm can help! They will assess your current website or help you build a new website from scratch using SEO from the beginning.
3. Establish a Presence on Social Media
Another great way to connect with potential customers and keep current ones engaged is to build your business’s social media presence.
Be sure that you keep your branding consistent between your webpage and any social media accounts. You should also link to your website to increase SEO and drive more traffic to your page and vice versa.
You do not need to open an account on every single social media platform. Research your target audience and figure out where they tend to hang out online. Are they Facebook people or do they use Pinterest more?
Once you know which social media sites your potential and current customers like to use, focus on establishing a presence on those sites.
4. Try Paid Advertising Methods
SEO works great, but it takes a few months to see results. A faster way to attract people to your new website is to invest in paid advertising methods online. Google offers two kinds of paid advertising to boost your business’s online visibility: Google Display Ads and Google Search Ads.
Google Display Ads appear as banner ads on the top, side, or bottom of another related website. Google Search Ads, also known as Adwords, appear under search engine results pages above the organic search results.
Facebook Ads and other social media ads work similarly. They often feature more specific targeting tools to help you narrow down your ad audience even further. This way you can tailor every advertisement based on the keywords and services/products you want to sell.
5. Mobile Optimization
Another vital step in winning website strategies is not forgetting about mobile optimization. Although this relates to SEO, the importance of mobile optimization still warrants mentioning on its own.
Most major search engines require a mobile-friendly version of your website to rank well on results pages and drive traffic. That alone makes mobile important.
It gets even more important when you realize by 2020 researchers predict that people will conduct more than 210 million searches from mobile devices.
If you do not have a mobile-friendly website, your business misses out on a massive source of online traffic.
Grow Your Montana Business with a Reliable Website Design and Marketing Partner
Ready to incorporate these 5 essential website strategies into your current digital marketing plan? If you do it right, you should see results within a few weeks.
But what do you do if you’re still not sure how to implement these winning strategies? Get help from experts like the ones at First Call Web.
Contact First Call Web today for a free web consultation to see how they can help grow your Montana business and turn it into a winner!
