Promoting your website

Once you have designed your website, you should ensure that you have a strategy in place to publicize it so that your target market can find it.

This means your website is Search Engine Optimized (SEO), or designed with elements in mind that ensure your website ranks well among search engine results pages (SERP). There are a number of ways that you can optimize and promote your website, and these are available across a wide budgetary range so that even start-ups can maximise their publicity:

SEO

When it comes to promoting your website, utilising SEO keywords is a great place to start.

These keywords can be sourced using tools such as the Google Keyword Tool Planner, and should be worked naturally into the copy on your website. These words indicate key phrases that are used to search for things online. For example, if your business is in the plumbing market, you can see how many people type phrases to do with plumbers in your local area into Google. You can then make sure you use the phrase somewhere on your website so that when Google’s algorithms trawl the internet looking for these phrases, your website is returned in the results.

Working with a professional copywriter who is skilled in SEO will help to ensure your copy contains the right keywords and the right number of them, as using too many (or “stuffing”) the content can result in your website actually being penalized by Google’s algorithms.

Paid Search marketing

Utilising SEO keywords is one way to drive traffic to your website through search engines. With paid search marketing however, you are able to pay to ensure that your results are near the top irrespective of the SEO found on other websites. You are essentially a “sponsored” result that is returned above organic search engine results.

There are essentially two main types of paid search marketing:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) - With this model of online marketing, you as an advertiser pay a fee each time a customer clicks on your ad. On the upside, you list higher in search engine results and in sponsored areas of the webpage, which can increase the number of clicks you receive. However, this in turn can mean that this method of marketing can quickly become expensive. This is a popular method with companies wanting to increase the traffic to their website.
• Cost-per-impression (CPM or "cost-per-mile") - This marketing tactic should in fact be named “cost-per-thousand-impressions”, as you as an advertiser will pay the search engine a fee for every 1,000 times your ad is shown amongst search results. This differs from the above method, as the money is paid simply for views, not for click-throughs, meaning your customer base does not necessarily have to click your ad and be directed to your website for you to have to pay. In this sense, this is ideal for businesses who are focusing their marketing efforts on brand awareness as opposed to sales.

Social media marketing

Social media has become an incredibly popular way for both B2C and B2B companies to reach their target market, and is seen as an organic alternative to paid search marketing. Creating social media profiles on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube enables you to share content from your website across a larger audience. You can also sponsor tweets and place paid-for Facebook ads that target your specific client demographic.

Blogging

An extension of social media, blogging is another organic way of driving traffic to your website. You can blog yourself, or hire a freelancer to do it for you, and create content specific to your business or niche industry. This copy should ideally contain both SEO keywords and images to better their performance in search engine results. Studies have shown that marketers who made blogging a priority were 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.