Marketing Your Website

How can you get more visitors to your website?

Too many businesses make the mistake of thinking that e-marketing begins and ends with the search engines. In fact search engines are usually not the best way of directing traffic to your website and getting to the top of the search engines can be costly, time-consuming, competitive and relatively ineffective!

It is very easy to be influenced by inaccurate and misleading claims on the effectiveness of search engines and search engine optimisation services. Yes, you can be guaranteed top ranking in the search engines, but at what cost? The bottom line is, your competitors are probably paying good money to be there... can you match their budget? And will top ranking with your most important keywords guarantee more traffic and more sales? Most people surfing/searching for services will use search engines to find services/products, but by far the greatest (and usually the most beneficial/targeted traffic) generally comes from traditional marketing and advertising techniques. Most of our customers, including those who have managed to get to the top of the search engines, get most of their business from visitors who have seen their website promoted somewhere other than the Internet!

So what can you do to stimulate traffic?

To market your website effectively you will need a complete strategy... and included in that strategy you will need to consider other factors such as:

• Can you cope with the business it is likely to generate?
• Can you afford the costs associated with the marketing techniques you employ?
• Can you afford the extra bandwidth costs (hosting costs become more expensive the more traffic that is directed to your website)
• How effectively are you targetting potential customers? It is easy to waste budget by driving unwanted traffic to your website.

In the following sections we will look at a complete checklist of key items you need to consider when marketing your website. If you wish to discuss specific needs or strategies please do not hesitate to contact us using the contact button on the left or, for complete IT Solutions/strategies, through our parent company, Hitchman IT Solutions Ltd. (email: ewd@hitchmanitsolutions.co.uk or telephone: 0844 8042997).

For Search Engine Strategies continue to Part 2 of our E-Marketing Guide