Getting your business website in the spotlight is important to building your brand. If you actually do any business through your website, then it’s not just about branding but actually getting business. Fortunately, there are many ways to get your business website some attention if you implement some useful tricks and tools. Many of these techniques are affordable, and all can be effective. Here are some ways of getting your business website in the spotlight with both on and offline tools.
Online Techniques
Forbes has useful content about driving more exposure and traffic to your website. In regards to your website, you need to have two things. First, you need to optimize it at a technical level so everything works and provides a seamless user experience.
For example, you want your pages loading quickly for a big win. This is so customers don’t turn away. Second, your content needs to be nothing short of insatiable. Provide readers and visitors information and answers that make them trust you. Offer tools, information, and anything that will get them to spend more time on your site and be more engaged with your business. Try to offer your customers as many reasons as you can to spend time on your website.
In terms of generating traffic, there are two big things you can do. The first is pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC. The second is search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO.
PPC ads are the ads you see in Google on search results pages that are above the organic search results. You can pay for those spots for certain keywords and get your website link placed above everything else. This results in nearly instant traffic for as many clicks as you pay for.
SEO takes more time, but it’s also very cost-effective. Getting backlinks is a big part of it, but it really starts with keyword research and optimizing for those keywords in both getting backlinks and creating content on your website.
SEO is something you should be doing from day one of your business. And don’t let up until you’re ready to sell it. SEO is an ongoing process of building your website’s credibility and ranking on strong platforms such as Google, Amazon, and Apple. Results may be slow at first, but you’ll start seeing them in a few months. This is not only great for your website when it comes to local google searches, but it also gets your website linked all over the web, helping you find new customers, and helping new clients find you.
A very common tactic is to use PPC ads to get traffic going until SEO benefits can kick in. Then, you can start switching to SEO alone.
Backlinks Still Matter
You might recall a time when all you had to do to rank highly was have lots of backlinks pointing to your website. People would pay for hundreds to thousands of links all directed at their homepage to rise up the search engine rankings. Link quantity doesn’t really help anymore, but white-label link-building can. Search engines look at the quality of the websites with the backlinks as well as diversity in the link portfolio. The background and reputation of any website backlinking to you establish authority and trust for websites now.
This authority is a measure of trustworthiness that google finds with your website and the websites that link to and from your page. This trustworthiness ensures that the web isn’t cluttered by spam and scammy websites. If you build your backlink profile correctly, Google will reward you with top placement on their platforms and automation devices such as Google Home.
Once you start SEO for your website, you shouldn’t ever quit your efforts. Your credibility with major search engines can become stale and may force you to start from scratch if you ever decide to start your SEO campaign again. Keeping up your efforts at backlinking is the best way to ensure your investment pays off in the long run. You’ll build more trust with Google and you’ll continue finding more customers and contacts.
If your website is new, you’ve probably been attempting to pull it up on your computer’s search engines. You’ve probably been trying to type in different combinations of keyword querrys to no avail. You’ll quickly find why linkbuilding is so important. Whether you own an excavation business, a clothing line, plumbing services, home repair, or any business where you need visibility to customers in your area or across the nation, SEO is why your business gains exposure to your new customers.
Many businesses are choosing to have their backlinking done internally within their company. If this is the case for you, make sure that you
- Appoint someone in charge with strong communication and language skills.
- Appoint someone in charge who has a strong understanding of the different metric systems involved with rating your website, and the websites of other companies.
- Have a team of writers who can create quality content for distribution on other websites. You can also consider outsourcing this task. There are websites that allow you to place orders with experienced writers who can generate content relative to your links.
- Consider allowing guest bloggers on your website to increase traffic, and generate a flow of fresh and relevant content for your readers.
- Create a system that makes it easy to find new websites for bulk outreach. Go for quantity. Reach out to as many websites as possible, and create a system for cataloging each website’s requirements and metric rankings. Look for websites that cater to a specific niche, as these are the types of site that carry the most trust with google. Any site that publishes garbage links such as gambling, adult content, and other off topic subjects can hurt your authority with Google.
- Put someone in charge of email communications. As you reach out to more sites, you’ll have more emails flooding your inbox. You need someone in charge who can prioritize email messages, maintain contact with websites, and get your company’s backlinks published on those websites.
10 Offline Methods for Promoting Your Website
A lot of your website promotion is likely to happen digitally, but there are things you can do in the analog world to help it out, too.
- Business Cards: Your website should be listed on all your business stationery. Make an impression when a customer takes your business card. Get your business card disturbed by referrals, vendors, and storefronts.
- Free Shipping: Your brick-and-mortar team can help in-store customers find items on your website. Offer shipping perks like free shipping above a certain threshold. Use in-store tablets to make a great shopping experience for customers looking to purchase from your company’s entire inventory stock. This helps you get inventory off the shelf. Extend those shipping perks to customers who strictly shop online.
- Go to Shows: Personal interactions happen a lot at trade shows, conferences, and industry meetings. Business owners can get quite chatty with each other. These are great ways to learn new things, form new partnerships, and target new customers.
- Include in All Advertising: Your website needs to be included in all formal advertising, from billboards to commercials. Radio broadcasts can be an easy, cheap way to let customers in your area know about clearances, sales events, and your website.
- Promotional Items: Customers love freebies, and they’ll freely display your website with them. If you’re telling yourself that you need more customers like the ones you just had, make sure you’re letting them leave with a free hat, water bottle, or shirt promoting your company website.
- Speak at Events: As long as an event is relevant, you can take the opportunity to mention your website. State fairs, outdoor events, and marathons are all good places you can make a presence for a quick shout-out. For greater stage presence, offer to speak at local trade shows, job fairs, career seminars, and other public events. You may get turned down a few times. But eventually, you can be a guest speaker for a number of seminars, webinars, or conferences. Use these events to promote your website.
- Support Area Organizations: Supporting local nonprofits is always good press. You can also sponsor high school baseball games and other types of events to get your business a bit of local exposure.
- Use Vehicle Ads: Whether it’s company vehicles or your personal ride, magnet or vinyl advertising gets attention. Look into building a unified fleet of vehicles for your business. Just like employees in your business may have uniforms, a fleet of vehicles should be uniform together in terms of vehicle types, colors, and branding. You want your customers to know it’s one of your vehicles before they can read the print. Get customers to your website with your vehicle branding.
- Voicemail: Whether it’s customers on hold or those who call after hours, leave a prompt directing them to your website.
- Word-of-Mouth: Offer customers discounts and incentives for leaving reviews that mention your URL. This can be a great tool for SEO purposes as well.
Be Patient
PPC ads can start generating traffic to your website immediately. They should continue doing so until you pull the plug on paying for them. Search engine optimization will take time, however. Depending on the specific keywords you try to rank for and how long you get backlinks, you might not notice a statistically significant rise in your traffic for six weeks. The full impact might not be felt for six months. Stick with it, though, as the payoff is well worth it.
The highest ranked websites on the web experience high traffic and have been working on their ranking campaign for years. Some companies prefer to handle their backlinking internally. But many companies are outsourcing those tasks to third parties, affordably, with high-yielding results.
