The first point, are peo­ple com­ing to your web­site, raises lots of issues to look into, and we’ll get to that in just a minute.

The sec­ond point, what can they do when they come to your web­site, is a huge fac­tor in deter­min­ing suc­cess or fail­ure. If your web­site has a dif­fi­cult user inter­face, or lacks use­ful infor­ma­tion, the traf­fic you are able to gen­er­ate for your web­site will mostly be wasted.

The third point is less about your web­site and online strat­egy, and is really all about your company’s rep­u­ta­tion, your prod­uct, and your mar­ket. If you insist on try­ing to sell over-priced com­modi­ties to a sat­u­rated mar­ket dur­ing a reces­sion and in the mid­dle of a cor­po­rate scan­dal, well, let’s just say your online mar­ket­ing strat­egy is not going to save the day.

Tell the World
Once your web site is up and run­ning it’s time to let the world know – the world being any­one in your mar­ket with access to an inter­net con­nec­tion. Do not assume that if you build it, they will come.

Intro­duce Your Web­site to the Search Engines
A crit­i­cal ele­ment for prac­ti­cally any cor­po­rate web­site is how well your web­site plays with the search engines. In North Amer­ica, that means Google, Bing and Yahoo pri­mar­ily, although there are many other search engines, some with very spe­cific scopes. Don’t for­get YouTube, which is actu­ally North America’s sec­ond most-used site for con­duct­ing searches, right after Google.

Many pur­chases these days involve some kind of online search; for prod­uct infor­ma­tion, pric­ing, reviews, opin­ions, options, and alter­na­tives; and if cus­tomers do not see your web­site when they are doing a purchase-related search, you miss an oppor­tu­nity, and in many cases maybe the only oppor­tu­nity, to engage that customer.

The “Free” Option
For your web­site to attract more vis­i­tors, search engines could be your new best friend. And to get the search engines’ atten­tion, there are two ways to go.

1. The free option: organic site links on the search results page, and/or
2. The paid option: adver­tis­ing on search engines.

Search engine opti­miza­tion, or SEO, is all about tun­ing your web­site so that when peo­ple search for prod­ucts like yours, they see your web­site listed on the search engine’s results pages. It’s not uncom­mon for a search engine to return lit­er­ally mil­lions of search results on a sin­gle search query, but if your web­site is listed at num­ber 999,000, you can guar­an­tee no one will ever find it from a search engine.



So what’s a web­site to do? Here is the secret to mak­ing your web­site friendly to search engines: pro­vide really good, rel­e­vant con­tent that focuses on your cus­tomers first, and what you can do for them, sec­ond. Yes, there are lots of tech­niques to prop­erly opti­mize a site for search engines, which is why there is a whole indus­try related to SEO, but at its essence, it’s really about pro­vid­ing a use­ful result to a searcher.

The search engines are only suc­cess­ful busi­nesses as long as they pro­vide search results that peo­ple find use­ful, so it fol­lows that if peo­ple find your web­site use­ful for spe­cific kinds of searches related to what they are look­ing for, the search engines will reward your web­site by increas­ing its vis­i­bil­ity on their results pages. There is no charge to com­pa­nies for these organic list­ings. It is a mutu­ally ben­e­fi­cial rela­tion­ship, and every­body wins.

If your web­site is not already friendly to search engines, under­stand that improv­ing your website’s organic vis­i­bil­ity takes time. The actual time it takes will depend on a num­ber of fac­tors; in fact, there is a long list of issues that can impede your website’s vis­i­bil­ity, which is why we put so much effort into our clients’ SEO strate­gies. A robust SEO strat­egy may take a while to exe­cute, but it pays big div­i­dends when all the pieces start com­ing together and a web­site starts get­ting more exposure.

The Paid Option
The other method for get­ting more vis­i­bil­ity on search engines is paid search, or pay-per-click (PPC) adver­tis­ing. PPC has a few big advan­tages over SEO:

1. It gets much faster results than SEO. Depend­ing on how much you are will­ing to spend, and how rel­e­vant your ads and land­ing pages are, you can get a lot of vis­i­bil­ity very quickly.
2. With PPC you can get vis­i­bil­ity for search terms you might not have any chance at show­ing up for using SEO alone, thereby expos­ing your brand to a broader audi­ence.
3. You can adjust an ad cam­paign imme­di­ately and track the results accurately.

So what’s the catch? Well, paid search costs money. The big adver­tis­ers can eas­ily spend thou­sands of dol­lars per day adver­tis­ing on search engines. That’s in addi­tion, of course, to all their other kinds of mar­ket­ing. For some prac­ti­cal ideas on build­ing and run­ning your own PPC cam­paigns in-house, down­load our free Mar­ket­ing Hero Quick­Start eBook.

Inte­grated Mar­ket­ing
If your com­pany has a mar­ket­ing team in charge of online mar­ket­ing, and another in charge of offline, under­stand that both teams will do bet­ter if they can inte­grate their efforts to sup­port each other. For exam­ple, take every offline oppor­tu­nity you can to pro­mote your web­site:

• Include your website’s address (the URL) on all your printed com­mu­ni­ca­tions

o Invoices
o Let­ter­head
o Envelopes
o busi­ness cards.

• Men­tion or high­light the URL on most, if not ALL, of your adver­tis­ing

o Radio
o TV
o News­pa­pers and mag­a­zines
o direct mail pieces
o on-hold mes­sag­ing
o t-shirts, etc.

• If appro­pri­ate, put the URL right on your prod­ucts, and of course include it in your prod­uct doc­u­men­ta­tion.

• Put the URL on com­pany vehi­cles. Basi­cally, if there is a place where you are dis­play­ing or men­tion­ing the com­pany name, the web address should usu­ally be there too.

As you apply all these online and offline ideas to attract more qual­i­fied vis­i­tors to your web­site, you will need to pay atten­tion to what those vis­i­tors actu­ally do on your web­site. Are they engag­ing with your con­tent, are they tak­ing action like join­ing your mail­ing list, watch­ing your webi­nars, or rais­ing their hands in some way that you can build a rela­tion­ship to take them from ‘just look­ing’ to ‘customer’?

Sum­mary
To drive more traf­fic to your web­site:

1. Opti­mize your web­site for search engines.
2. Try paid search adver­tis­ing if you need to increase your online mar­ket­ing results quickly, reach a new audi­ence, take advan­tage of unex­pected oppor­tu­ni­ties, defend your mar­ket share, or intro­duce a new prod­uct.
3. Include your web address on as many of your com­mu­ni­ca­tions as pos­si­ble. If it men­tions or dis­plays your com­pany name, con­sider includ­ing your com­pany URL at the same time.

In com­bi­na­tion, SEO and PPC can be an incred­i­bly effec­tive mar­ket­ing strat­egy. A chal­lenge that many busi­nesses face is coor­di­nat­ing their mar­ket­ing efforts. Ide­ally offline and online mar­ket­ing work together to form a com­pre­hen­sive, holis­tic approach that helps mar­keters deliver com­pelling mes­sages to the right audi­ence, in the right for­mat, at the right time in their pur­chase deci­sion mak­ing process.

Need Help?
If you are not sure whether SEO, PPC, or a com­bi­na­tion of both is the solu­tion you need to drive results, ask us for a free con­sul­ta­tion. We can help you iden­tify and pri­or­i­tize where the oppor­tu­ni­ties are for your business.

And if you are under pres­sure to get your mar­ket­ing mov­ing fast, we have a new 90-day Quick­Start Pro­gram that focuses on Paid Search and Con­ver­sion Opti­miza­tion to help you build a suc­cess­ful PPC ad cam­paign plus pro­vide a road map of what you will need to do after the ini­tial 90 days to keep the momen­tum going. Call us at 1–800-277‑9997 or email us at -email-.


Biography / Resume : Karl joined Mediative’s service delivery team in 2008. A year later, he moved to the company’s research department where he conducted online surveys, eye-tracking studies, one-on-one interviews and usability testing. Most recently, he transitioned to the marketing department. Before Mediative, Karl worked in sales and marketing. In 1997, he caught the digital bug and became the original “webmaster” for Roland Canada Music. Around the same time, he began teaching the relatively new topic of Internet marketing to college and university students. Karl’s insatiable curiosity and drive to get to the core and substance of every situation has served him well in his various roles at Mediative.