Believe you me, I’ve been as confused as the next person with the never ending changes in social media marketing, hence wanting to give people a short cut to the knowledge I’ve learnt, and continue to learn, on a daily basis as part of my work. Here’s my quick 10 step small business web marketing strategy checklist for ensuring your website or blog is working effectively for you.
If you want your website or blog to be working successfully for you, the following 10 points cover the essentials – gone are the days when you set up a static website and then up-date it once in a blue moon. With the nature of social media and sharing of ‘real time’ information, sites must be regularly up-dated with fresh, interesting content, and promoted to build relationships, and encourage people to engage with you.
1 Be crystal clear about your overall marketing strategy
- What are your main marketing objectives?
- Which audiences do you want to target?
- Where will you find them?
- What challenges and problems are they experiencing?
- What solutions can you provide through your products and services?
- How will you measure success?
2 Keyword research
Come up with the key search terms and phrases that you want your website or blog to rank for, based on keywords and phrases that you think your target markets are searching on and/or would be likely to enter in to a search engine in order to find your particular service, product or information. These days, people are searching in a much more conversational style rather than one or two keywords. Known as semantic search, Google is now looking to return much more customised results based on a more intuitive approach. Thus the more you provide valuable content based on real life searches, and longer phrases the better.
Check each keyword/phrase against the Google competition – simply enter the term into Google and check the numbers of competing pages. To be competitive, aim for keywords/phrases that have less than 50,000 competing pages. (Tip: make sure to put inverted commas around your keyword/phrases to ensure you are searching for an exact match – this will show up lower levels of competition than broad match phrases.)
Then check out how many searches are being made for these keywords/phrases using Google’s Keyword Planner. Aim for at least 80 searches per day or 2,400 per month.
3 Develop backlinks to your website/blog
Research relevant and appropriate sites to develop backlinks to your website/blog. Now that Google places a much bigger emphasis on not building 100s of links in a ‘spammy’ way, be sure to focus on the sites that have a higher page ranking and authority with Google, and build links organically in different ways. The number one way to do this these days is through writing and sharing valuable content across social media platforms that people want to naturally link back to remembering to vary your anchor text (see point 4 below). There are mixed views on the value of creating backlinks through blog commenting and article marketing, for example, since Google got wise to this and penalised many sites in recent changes.
4 Up-date your website or blog
Use your chosen keywords/phrases in your website/blog title, description and header tags – and in your website/blog’s domain name if possible.
Naturally weave the keywords/phrases into the appropriate pages of your website/blog. Insert hyperlinks in your website/blog content using your keywords as the anchor text to draw people into your site as well as further optimising your site’s ranking with search engines. The important word here is naturally – it’s not about stuffing your pages with your chosen keywords or repeating them in unrealistic anchor text, but rather providing valuable content that includes the likely phrases that people are searching on.
5 Use your site to build a responsive email list & email marketing strategy
Develop an attractive, free offer to encourage visitors to provide you with their name and email address eg, free newsletter, 10 top tips relating to your area of expertise, free e.book, competition, audio or video home study course etc. Develop an email marketing strategy for how you’re going to regularly interact with your list using a free or paid for email marketing/email list manager such as MailChimp (free for up to x number of conacts) or paid for (eg Aweber).
6 Promote your website/blog
Via relevant social media platforms. As mentioned, be sure to write and share useful content relevant to your business or area of interest, which will encourage sharing. Social media marketing is playing an increasingly important part of how Google ranks sites so it’s now essential to build it into your internet marketing strategy. Sites include:
- social bookmarking sites – StumbleUpon, specialised bookmarking sites relating to your sector
- social networking sites – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ & specialised social networking sites relating to your sector
- social news sites – Reddit
- video – YouTube
- free blogging platforms such as Tumblr
- photo sharing sites such as Instagram and Flikr
- location based mobile platforms – eg, Foursquare
7 Monitor your website/blog’s traffic
Install Google Analytics on your website/blog http://www.google.com/analytics/ – a free monitoring tool – to analyse visitors’ activity on your site, including all sorts of information such as number of daily visitors, which are the most popular pages, how your visitors are finding you, which sites are tending to refer visitors via links to your site etc.
8 Develop your social media campaign
- Research which social media sites are being used by your existing and potential customers/clients & the sorts of conversations that are taking place, including the types of information they would like to see you sharing.
- Produce a social media plan based on your research and business/marketing objectives, including metrics for how you will measure success.
- Write profiles for each of your chosen social media platforms incorporating your researched keywords/keyword phrases. Start off with one or two channels to begin with, and plan out the information you’re going to share, and how you are going to keep channels regularly up-dated.
- Include your 1. chosen social media icons/buttons on your site for visitors to easily connect with you on those platforms, and 2. share this icons for people to easily favourite and share your information/blog posts with others.
- Familiarise yourself with the etiquette of each social media channel – remember the two-way nature of social media, give value first and don’t over promote your products/services, look to build up relationships, provide value.
- Mix up your information – make it timely, interesting, thought provoking, share useful links to further information/other websites/blogs.
- Use different media – eg, text, photos, images, webinars, podcasts, videos.
- BE human! Use a conversational writing style.
9 Encourage social media engagement
Establish some social media guidelines based on your business objectives and values and encourage your team, staff, different departments to engage in social media on your business’s behalf.
10 Integrate your on and off line marketing activities
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but will take you a long way down the road of implementing a successful web marketing and social media strategy. All the new methods of marketing on line and social media can be confusing, but can no longer be ignored irrespective of what business you’re in. The good news is it isn’t rocket science and, done correctly, can be an extremely cost-effective way of promoting your business – albeit always remember your time is also money!