I Built My Website – Now What?

So you followed all the advice from your web design consultant and created a modern website for your business that beats them all, now you are wondering how you can start marketing your website and start making money from your online visitors.

Like any great business resource, your website won’t work magic on its own. It requires care and feeding and creating a small business website is only the beginning.

Burt Systems has been designing websites since 2009. During that time, we were so fortunate to test out many marketing strategies that failed on many occasions, but because we had a great platform to keep trying, we’ve collected a great many tips to marketing your website that will successfully help your business realise more leads.

1. Get your website visible to search engines
2. Add your location to Google My Business
3. Ask your best customers to review your business online
4. Engage you customers on social media platforms
5. Keep providing great content that will get you links to your site

Great tips on marketing your website

1. Get your website visible to search engines

Optimizing your site is the best way of letting search engines know what you are all about and get them to send you relevant traffic which means more customers.

Don’t miss reading: 10 Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Consultant

Whenever you need something – verify a lead, answer your kid’s homework question, a pies of information, price of a product – what’s the first thing you usually do? You pull up a search engine and type in your query, right? Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches every day. So, it’s no wonder that so many companies are scrambling to get involved in search engine optimization (SEO), a strategy that helps businesses rise to the top of search rankings for queries related to their business, products or services.

Most online businesses in Uganda have ignored SEO and gone all in for the a great looking website and I can assure you that you’re taking the wrong path. Without SEO, you’ll be hard-pressed to get visibility in search engines at all.

Optimize every page of your site with rich content. All of your pages, especially your main lineup (home, services, contact, others), need to include well written, descriptive content. Ideally, this content will be optimized for specific target keywords and phrases (as long as the text doesn’t seen unnatural). If you have pages without much content, prevent Google from indexing them by using the “noindex” attribute, and “nofollow” any links to those pages, as well.

The key to a successful optimization is to be specific. For example, if your business is Jenny’s Gorilla Adventure and you proud on being the best tour agency, you want to optimize around gorillas & safaris related keywords, not generic terms such as Jenny’s Tours and Travel.  Remember, there may be a lot of other tour agencies in Uganda, but yours is the only one with affordable holiday packages.

The more you use keywords to target the exact products or services you offer, the more you will stand out from the crowd of other websites and that is how to start marketing your website and attracting new customers.

After optimising your all your website pages, next is to let the search engines know what you got to sell online. Submit your site to search engines.

This can be a tedious and time-consuming process, but you only need to do it once. If you are pressed for time, and who isn’t, there are a number of free search engine submission tools that will help get the job done. There are also paid services, but most of the time you can get what you need from a good free service. Just make sure all the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) are included.

2. Add your location to Google My Business

More people are searching for location based searches and are even launching their search from sites such as Google Maps. If you have a physical location, it is imperative that you show up in local search to get more customers. Add images of both the outside and inside of your business office.

Make sure that you post your hours and a link to your website. The more information you provide, the easier you make it for customers to find you. If you are a service provider, have a mobile business or work at home, you can define your service area and hide your physical address. That way, your business will come up in the results for searches in your service area.

3. Ask your best customers to review your business online

Customers make purchasing decisions in the blink of an eye, and often do so based on what other customers have to say about your business or service. Ask your best customers to review your business online. You may have a great reputation in the community; however, you need to build that reputation online as well to attract new customers while marketing your website.

As an entrepreneur, you know your reputation in an invaluable asset. What people say about your online business matters, and that’s especially true about what customers are saying online.Online businesse owners should be listening to feedback — and that means monitoring online reviews from your customers.

While online reviews may seem like a small piece of the bigger picture that makes up your online presence, more users are relying on review websites when deciding what products and services to buy. In today’s digital age, online reviews influence 93% of customers’ buying decisions.

Online reviews are important for a number of reasons, and have major implications through their ability to affect:

• Your rankings in local search engines
• Which search results actually get clicked on?
• Consumer purchasing decisions

That makes online reviews as critical to your local SEO strategy as building citations and on-site optimization. The critical thing to note is that the mental gap between reading a review and making a decision is ridiculously small — and customers typically decide yes or no almost immediately. So, as a small business, your online reputation can directly influence your bottom line.

Additionally, according to MOZ’s Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, online reviews are thought to make up 10% of how Google and other search engines decide to rank search results. So, chew on that for a bit before you catch your next point.

4. Engage you customers on social media platforms

Image Credit: Pixabay.com

With the advent and popularity of free internet access, funa saizi yo and scramble for mbs, social media has become part of nearly everyone’s daily routine. We’re all connected, all the time, whether we’re texting each other on Whatsapp, checking out videos of cute animals on Facebook, posting updates on Twitter, uploading a new picture of us to Instagram, etc.

One great way of marketing your website is to start sharing your staff on social media to reverage many ways to put your online businesses front and center on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Social media strategies you should apply

Social sharing will drive traffic to websites – posting links to quality content can garner shares, likes and comments. It also encourages social media users to migrate to official business websites.

Engaging with prospective clients via social media helps you keep your brand top of mind. By driving social traffic back to official websites, you’re able to increase organic search ranking. This lends greater authority to your site in the eyes of search engines.

Social media profiles rank in search engines – if you type the name of a business in a search engine, its social media profiles will likely pop up along with its official website. If a company is able to rank not only its website, but its social profiles as well, it will take up valuable real estate at the top of SERPs. This can help businesses beat out potential competitors in terms of visibility. When your social profiles align with your site, you’ll be more visible in SERPs.

Capturing external links is easier with social media – external links, and the authority of the websites doing the linking, comprise the most important factor for achieving high rankings in Google, according to Moz.

You can use social media platforms to share and promote your content. This increases the likelihood of other websites referring and linking back to it. Craft high-quality content to post on social media. People are more likely to link to content they want to read and share themselves and that another cheat sheet on marketing your website without buying links.

While social media may not have a direct connection to SEO, it certainly influences marketing your website success. As the number of social media users continues to rise, it’s likely social signals will become more powerful in terms of ranking. By producing content worth sharing and taking advantage of the platforms available, you can maximize the benefits you receive from social media.

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