If You Build a Web Presence, They Will Come
It would be nice if that were true.
If you build a website that follows best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), keep measuring your results, keep adding good material to it and keep working at improving its performance in the search engines; visitors will probably come.
At first, you may get only a few hundred, but your numbers will keep climbing if you persist.
If you have the right message when they arrive, some of your visitors will become clients.
If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. An effective web presence takes work, but provides rewards, especially for people who thrive on competition.
Get Found with Good SEO
If you plan to get traffic to your site from search engines, you will need to work at optimizing your business website for search. You will need fresh, useful material (“content”) for the site.
You wouldn’t open a new salvage yard in a different part of town and add a driver and truck without marketing to that area and trolling for clients. Marketing your web presence is the same.
To make your web presence work, you will have to put up a good site and support it with a solid, ongoing SEO effort. (Contact me for a free checklist of items that should be part of your SEO program.)
Delegate and Manage Your Web Presence
Most business owners are too busy to find the time to do all the SEO themselves. They just don’t have time to write blog posts, build inbound links, update LinkedIn, Tweet or add to the company Facebook page.
Rather than skip it, I suggest you delegate it.
Start by creating objectives, a clear plan, budget, tasks, timelines and by making a person accountable for each element of the plan. Get your key people copies of SEO for Dummies so they can learn how search marketing works and how the tasks they are working on fit with the plan for generating revenue from the website.
Give the SEO Jobs to Your Most Competitive Employees
The Internet is perhaps the most measurable marketing medium ever devised. You will be able to see where your site ranks for the keywords you care about. You will know how site visitors arrived using those keywords, what pages they looked at and how long they stayed on a given page. You will be able to measure how many of your visitors made inquiries or placed orders.
It’s fun to shoot past a competitor who isn’t doing the work. Many of your competitors don’t, so even small companies can win by being persistent and creative. Start building a winning web presence today.
Let me help you get started by giving you an SEO scorecard on your existing web presence and some free advice about how to improve your results. E-mail me your URL with SEO scorecard in the subject line, and I will be glad to share some thoughts with you.
Remember only you can make business great!
Ron Sturgeon, business owner, consultant and peer bench marketing leader, combines over 35 years of entrepreneurship with an extensive resume in consulting, keynote speaking and business writing. Ron can be reached at 5940 Eden, Haltom City, TX 76117, 817-834-3625 or by email at rons@MrMissonPossible.com.