Search Engine Optimization
Attract
Attracting visitors to your website, and ultimately to your business, is important. There are dozens of ways to do this, some more effective than others. Do you have a system in place to consistently drive traffic to your website?
Engage
Once you have people visiting your website, what do you do with them? According to Marketing Sherpa, between 90% and 98% of website visitors take no action the first time they visit a website. And once they're gone, it's unlikely that they'll ever be back.
Do you have a system in place to capture the contact details of at least a percentage of those 90-98%? They're interested enough to look at your site - they might even be potential customers.
And once you have their contact details in your database, what are you doing with them? Most small businesses don't have a follow-up system in place to build trust with their prospects and establish themselves as a credible supplier.
Analyse
One of the great things about marketing online is that practically everything can be measured. You can easily monitor the number of visits your website gets and the actions taken by those visitors; you can track the number of calls you get and the number of email leads you get; web technology allows you to see exactly which actions your prospects took as they went through your sales funnel.
Are you tracking and measuring your marketing system, or are you flying by the seat of your pants?
Improve
Once you have the first three elements of your marketing system in place, you can start using the data you get from your tracking and measurements to improve the system's performance. Just tweaking the text used on a landing page can make a big difference in the number of people who sign up for your mailing list.
And there are many other things you can improve as well. For example, the value of your marketing system can be eroded by the presence of negative comments and bad reviews - in fact, it hardly makes sense to market your business at all if people find bad reviews when they search for your keywords.
Do you have a system in place to monitor what people are saying about you on the Internet? Are you actively seeking out referrals from your customers? Does your marketing system get your customers to buy more often?