By Greg Winning

The 8 most commonly forgotten marketing elements of business websites.

In all the excitement of building a new website, one of the most overlooked elements is how your marketing strategy works with it. So, ask yourself, is your marketing really integrated into your website plan or is your site going to end up as an online brochure that only people who have already met you visit?

Here’s the 8 most commonly forgotten marketing elements of a business website:

1)Search Engine Optimisation
So many sites, even those designed by professionals, forget to ensure that the site will be able to be seen by the search engines. If the search engines don’t list you, then how will anybody searching on the internet find you unless they already know who you are?

Have you worked on your keywords? Are they keywords that hundreds of thousands of other sites use making it hard for you to compete or are they low competition high demand keywords that will make you stand out? SEO is a highly specialised area of the internet industry.

If you’re serious about having your site rank in the first few listing on Google, you should consult a professional. If you still can’t get listed highly, then you may want to think about a paid listing instead.

2)Content
Google, the most popular search engine, has been designed to favour sites in their search rankings that have good quality, unique and relevant content. If your site has gone for the less is more approach, copied and pasted articles from other sites and decided a site with lots of flash animation and graphics is the way to go, you may find it more difficult to be listed in the search engines.

3)Copy
Well written copy is vital for success on the internet, even more than offline, because it influences not just the reader but the search engines as well!
For example, if you have keywords in your Meta tags but they don’t appear in your copy - and in the right way - search engines may ignore you.

Your copy also needs to engage your visitors. You actually have about 3 seconds from the time someone lands on your home page to convince them to stay! Not long to get the sale is it?

The scary thing is that if they leave your site quickly, chances are they will never ever return! Boring copy that drones on and on about your business will not hold an audience. Here’s an example of what I mean.

“XYZ Pty Ltd has been helping Australians select paints for many years.

XYZ Pty Ltd is Australia's largest retail paint specialist with the biggest range of colours to choose from. Our experienced and informed staff members take pride in offering the best service and valuable assistance to XYZ Pty Ltd customers.”

The visitor to your site has been searching for information, not a sales pitch and while this may be ok on the About Us page, it certainly isn’t going to be effective in making visitors stay when they land on the home page.

Give visitors information and solutions and they will stay longer.
Your copy can sell to them softly while at the same time helping them with links to eventually end up at the point where they need to press the buttons you want them to.

4) Interaction
The internet isn’t a static piece of paper or a one way TV screen. Fantastically, for all businesses, it is a great way to interact with your customers and prospects. They can give you constant feedback about their preferences, wants and desires via a well thought out marketing strategy using the website as the hub.

Don’t miss the chance to get your visitors to participate in your site. They will stay longer, you’ll find out more about them and that will help you develop better strategies to sell to them in the longer term. Without an interactive element to your site, no matter how small, you might as well keep handing out brochures.

5)Web Design
A cheap and nasty looking site immediately makes the user question your business. With only 3 seconds to engage a visitor you don’t want to waste anytime trying to convince them to stay.

Badly designed and downright ugly sites make your job all the harder. Don’t get me wrong, you will find many ugly sites on the net, some run by highly successful marketers and copywriters who make lots of money despite the design.

The catch is that these self promoters need to write old fashioned direct selling copy and work hard to gain high volumes of traffic to get the sales.

If you’re running a full time offline local business, their tactics won’t work for you. Yours is a balancing act between making sure you visually impress without distracting from your copy and SEO requirements.

6)Website Promotion
How do you use your site if all your keywords are over supplied and you’re a local business where there isn’t a high volume of searches for “Café + Wembley”?

Your site needs to be linked into an overall marketing strategy and be included in all your promotions.

Ask yourself, “What purpose will my site have?”. Remember an online ‘presence’ is not enough! Your site doesn’t have to just generate leads, it can help maintain your customer relationships too.
For example, a café in the suburb of Wembley can offer customers the chance to win a free meal if they provide their e-mail address. Later the customers are sent an e-mail with the competition details. They click through to the cafe site from the e-mail and fill out a fun survey asking them to describe the most amazing experience they have ever had at a café.

Another e-mail is sent out announcing the winner.

The café has now not only provided their customers with some entertainment, a chance to win a prize and a reminder that they exist but with the customers feedback they can gain some insight into the type of  experiences they could offer in their café!

Remember, once your site and e-mail is set up, this is so much cheaper than a paper based campaign.

Non retail enterprises can also benefit from promotion of their site. A tax depreciation firm my marketing company consulted to, used real estate agents to send customers to their site to fill out their application form.

We also designed and wrote a free information booklet as a giveaway to use in all their general offline advertising to point traffic to their site, provide their contact details and then download the booklet. They were then able to follow up these leads and stay in contact with them by regular e-mail newsletters.

7 )Links
By running links to your site on other, relevant but non competitive sites, you can generate more visitors (traffic) to your website. In fact, this strategy doesn’t just help build traffic from the sites with the link; it means search engines may promote you to a higher position on their search listings.

However, there is a catch. The search engines won’t just get excited by any link coming into your site. Make sure your links are from relevant sites that have good traffic volumes (a massage therapist gets links from a major health site for example). The search engines figure that if a high volume traffic site is pointing to your site you must be relevant too.

8)Maintenance
Finally, don’t forget to keep your site up to date. Have you ever visited a website that hasn’t been updated since 2004? What’s the feeling you got when you realised the site you were looking at hadn’t been touched for 3 years? Did you think they had gone out of business? Perhaps you thought they were unorganised, lazy or didn’t care? If you’re going to spend the money, time and effort creating a site, make sure you spend a few hours each month keeping it fresh.

By covering all these online marketing areas, you will go along way to ensuring your website isn’t a waste of both time and money!

This weeks contributor is Greg Winning, director of Brando Marketing, a Perth based marketing consultancy firm with a unique 3 step marketing process for small business. 

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