How to Navigate the Online Marketing Slippery Path

It’s not an easy task to be successful at online marketing. One slip and you can practically watch your leads and sales roll down a hill and end up with some other company. Here are 10 key tips and suggestions to keep in mind as you make your way along online marketing routes.

1. Grow Thick Skin

Encourage your staff or Internet consultants to tell you the plain truth, instead of going out of their way not to offend or upset you.

Succeeding online is increasingly a more difficult goal to achieve. Sugarcoating or handholding (to make you feel good about your website) instead of facing up to the hard realities of properly doing business online, does NOT help you to maximize your online potential for success.

If your website design has serious issues, own up to them so the rest of your campaign can really pay off. In other words, if you're investing in getting more traffic but your visitors give up on your website, then you’ve failed.

2. Pick the Right Keywords for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

It’s not about just researching keywords. It’s about selecting keywords. You need to think about keywords in relation to the domain, competition, current rankings, existing content, planned content, page headers, keywords in URLs and more. Research is certainly an important first step, but you must also then select appropriate keywords that are ideal for wherever you intend to inject them.

3. Learn How Paid Search Really Works

The primary Pay-Per-Click (PPC) tools are easy. You can have an ad up in no time. If you waste your money, it’s not Google’s fault. If you send your paid search visitors to your home page and can make a good profit, great. Odds are though, you’re better off directing them to a specific interior web page. In fact, you’d be wise to make additional outstanding custom landing featuring clear Calls to Action minus a lot of distracting on page navigation.

4. Use Paid Search Negative Keywords

Why should you pay for the wrong keywords? Don't waste your money! Think of all of the ways you don’t want to be found. Maybe you sell men’s jackets. You better rule out women’s jackets! Your options – broad phrase versus exact match can make a huge difference. The more precise your targeted keywords are, the less likely it is that you will drive untargeted meaningless traffic to your website.

5. Use Misspellings with Paid Search

You can find different tools to intentionally generate misspelled keywords, including one at SEO Chat. Sure, these phrases won’t get a lot of traffic. But it could be worth while adding a number of them to your overall mix. It all adds up to a combined overall increase in website traffic you would otherwise never get.

6. Write Content – Lots of Content

At least from an SEO perspective, tiny websites get what they support – tiny traffic! Whether you expand your website with a blog or by adding more regular webpages following existing navigation, get busy writing more words. Yes, you may rank well for keywords on a single page. However, several pages (cross-linked with other pages) can make a big and positive impact on your website’s search engine rankings.

7. Don’t Bury Your Calls to Action

Too often, I see pages with 12 paragraphs followed by a phone number that’s probably going to be overlooked. Promote the phone number up high. Add a short form that web visitors can easily see. Create an image that points visitors to case studies, white papers, demos, how-to guides, etc. You build your website for web visitors to do more than simply look at it. Make your Calls to Action clear and compelling enough for visitors to actually take action.

8. Track Everything

Are website analytics on every page? Did you set up your goals (Google Analytics makes it easy)? Are you using all of the right settings with your paid search? For example, are your ads running all of the time or just when you want them to appear? Are you favoring certain ads or giving all of your ads a shot? Without proper and consistent tracking, you will find yourself guessing rather than clearly knowing what is (or isn’t) happening with your online business.

9. Don’t Ignore Link Building

Link building to your web site takes time – a lot of time! Sure, you can register with hundreds of free directories. But what’s the impact? Make sure you get links from industry-related websites and credible directories with structures and categories that relate to your specific services and products. Swap links with other businesses (try to get them to include strategic keywords when they link back to you). Create a blog and get involved in other blogs. If you participate, you’ll increase the odds that someone will link back to you. Share your knowledge – write articles for online publications (you always get a good link in your bio or signature). Speak at conferences (you’ll get another link that way too).

10. Test and Measure Everything

If people get lost on your website, fix it. If your keywords don’t rank, change them. If no one is calling, stop hiding your phone number next to your outdated 2003 copyright notice. Make note of where people leave their shopping carts in your digital aisle. Shorten your long response forms. Seriously, do you really need their address, zip code, state in all cases? Look at your competition. Are you charging more than they are and if so, can you defend your pricing? Add some testimonials – real ones (the fake variety are a turn off).

Bonus Tip:
Don’t neglect email marketing. You have email addresses. Treat them like gold on a regular basis. Get a real designer to craft a professional message, including great offers and brief introductions to your expert article which in turn, leads them over to your website for all of the exact details and insights of your offer.

Mike Murray is the Web Strategy Thought Leader for World Synergy, an interactive online marketing firm that focuses on website design, custom web applications and business infrastructure services and strategy. Mike has more than 13 years of experience with web site development and online marketing, frequently speaking at regional and national conferences, including search engine strategies.
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com

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