These days anyone can build a website, as there are more templates than ever and ready-made solutions look better than ever. The website someone builds may be beautiful, but is that the point?
Of course looks matter a great deal on a website, yet the key to a website’s success lies elsewhere. What a website needs in order to succeed is to achieve its objective.
For some websites the objective is selling online, for others it is getting phone orders, or simply helping a potential customer get to know the products easily.
For any of the above to happen, it is very important that people visit and find your website; in other words, your website has to stand out from the millions of websites on the internet.
To make this happen, there are many channels a user can follow to find your site or your e-shop. Some of them are:
- Google or other search engines
- X (formerly Twitter)
- online directories
- email marketing
The above are just some of the channels that can bring a user to your website, and they are useful mainly when we are talking about Greece.
The channels you can use differ from country to country. In China and Russia, Google is not the biggest search engine, while in Europe email marketing has become even harder under the stricter data-protection rules (GDPR).
So let’s see what we need to do to increase our site’s traffic by 300%.
Find out who your audience is
The first and most important step is to find out who our audience is.
Yes, you’ve heard it many times, but the question is how it’s done, and better still, how it’s done properly.
To define our audience, we should start by asking ourselves a question. Who are we speaking to? Who do we want to buy our products or services?
For example, to make a first categorisation: do we sell women’s or men’s products?
Do we sell products aimed mostly at young people, or at all age groups?
Does our audience want cheap products, or is our product aimed at people who want a quality, expensive product?
Which geographical area are we targeting?
By asking the questions above, and many others about our products and our audience, we save, for a start, a large part of our budget that would otherwise be wasted on people who are not interested in the products or services on our website.
As a second step, we could run Google Ads and use Google Analytics 4 or another tool to collect data on all the visitor characteristics above. Of course, the keywords we target in Google Ads play a big part.
If, for example, we target keywords such as “cheap shoes”, our audience will be people looking for something cheap, and they will expect a cheap product from us. So it is important to start with a broad range of keywords and then narrow it down according to the audience.
The conversion rate should also play an important role in that narrowing down, in other words how much we pay and how much profit we make from sales, but we will cover that in another article.
Google and Search Engines
Now that we have defined our audience, we know who we need to address. In other words, we know who we want to talk to.
Knowing who we need to talk to, we have to talk to them in the right way. We have to speak their language. We speak to a young person one way and to an older person another way.
So, once we have our website, we need to make sure Google and the others can see it.
Other search engines
I wrote “and the others” above because most of us pay no attention to search engines other than Google. Even if Google controls 70% of the Greek market, there is the other 30%, which is perfectly capable of giving us great results.
Think about which search engine comes preinstalled in Microsoft Edge, the browser built into Windows: Bing.
Perhaps your dad or mum has accidentally installed a toolbar that won’t let them search on Google, so they search from there?
By targeting these less experienced users, the results may be even better!
Google and what to do
First of all, list your business on Google Business Profile straight away. Map results attract a large audience and, for local searches, often appear above the organic results.
Look at the competition and decide whether to go for Google Ads or SEO. Neither is better or worse. There is what suits you and what will bring you profit. For example, even if you pay 500 euros to get one sale, if you are in wholesale and that sale brings you thousands of euros in profit, Google Ads may suit you even if it is expensive.
Telling you in this article what to do in each of these 2 cases would make it far too long, so we will list the most basic things your website absolutely must have.
- Fast loading speed
- A proper structure with H tags
- Long texts on its pages, over 700 words
- Mobile-friendly design
- Fast loading on mobile (AMP is no longer required by Google)
- HTTPS
- Easy navigation and good UX
Each of the above could be an article on its own, but the point I want to dwell on is this:
Articles: write articles
Write articles, and write original articles on topics that interest your audience. Writing articles pays off twice. First, it is good for your Google rankings, and second, it is a useful tool for promoting your website on social media.
I know it’s hard, and the first thing you’ll say is “what can I write about product X?”. The answer is that you can write a great deal, and if you approach it properly and with enthusiasm, users will engage with you too.
Target long-tail keywords
Skip general terms such as “shoes” and go for more specific ones such as “cheap summer sandals”. According to research, users now make more specific searches on search engines.
These are just a few of the things you can do on Google, but they are more than capable of working wonders.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
We will look at social media as a whole here, without going through each platform separately.
Rule one: First of all, a business or a website should have a FACEBOOK PAGE; a personal account on its own is not enough.
With a page we can see statistics for our posts, which tells us whether we are doing something right or wrong. We can also pay to promote our posts.
When we pay, we can promote on Facebook and Instagram at the same time. I prefer to do it separately.
Publishing just any post and then promoting it is the biggest mistake we can make, whatever the social media platform. For a post to be worth promoting, it has to be right:
- It has a good photo
- Quite often it includes a link to our website
- It has something to say and prompts people to interact with it.
- It has the right number of characters for the platform
- It has the right format for the platform; on Instagram, for example, hashtags are a must
- If there is a product in the photo or video, it is tagged
- The headline is interesting
- It invites the user to take an action
- The spelling is correct and it isn’t written in capital letters
The above are the absolute basics for a successful post on any social media platform.
How we spend our money on promotion depends on the audience we defined above. For example, a local business cares about users in its own area, and the rest of the world is irrelevant to it. Also, simply buying users to like our business page is a huge mistake.
We want users who genuinely like our business, or who like our page because they were impressed by our product. That way we gain potential customers and strengthen our branding at the same time.
Use your articles on social media
Once you have written good, interesting articles on your website, you can use them on social media. You can share them, and with an interesting caption alongside, bring people to your website.
Analytics and Back to the Start
Once you have done all the above, you should keep checking who your audience is and narrow it down, so that you spend as little as possible on advertising, or more accurately, so that your advertising is as efficient as possible.
That way you will know where to spend your digital marketing budget, and also whom to target with your offline marketing.
Patience
If you expect results immediately, you are very much mistaken. A reasonable time to see results is 6 months, though this depends on how big your budget is and how well you promote yourself on all the channels above.
Below is an image from a website that did all of the above:
The e-shop had been running since November with no visits; around then we stepped in and did the bare essentials. Whether or not the website sells (it does sell products), you can see the difference. The most impressive part is that this website has had no Facebook presence since we stopped handling its social media, and the promotion stopped in early March with nothing further done afterwards. What happened over the following months, though, is that the right work was rewarded, and we now have a happy client.
WebMate Is Here
If all of the above seems like a lot to do on your own (and believe me, these are the absolute essentials), you can email us and we’ll see how we can help make your digital marketing effective. Keep in mind that digital marketing brings sales and also builds your company’s brand more generally. In digital branding and digital marketing we have the know-how to lead you to success, together with building your website beautifully and effectively
Leave a comment