Consider your website an important investment, not an
expense. After all, it’s an extension of
your business. Having a website is not
an end, but a means to achieving your vision – attracting visitors, creating
business, increasing sales, boosting profit, providing useful tools and
information to your customers.
That’s why you need to place importance on maintaining your
website and keeping your online presence up-to-date. Here are a few tips to consider:
1. Keep your website content updated and relevant – It’s
crucial that your site content is current and relevant to your service industry
or products. Search engine spiders and
crawlers look for sites that have regular changes and tend to rank them higher
than sites that are stagnant.
2. Promote your website both online AND offline - Include
your website address to everything you have in print: stationery, business
cards, flyers, brochures, email signatures, signs, advertising, promotional
materials, etc. And, be sure to announce your new website to your
customers and get them excited about it.
Promote your website on the Internet, as well, starting with ensuring it is
optimized for the search engines.
Consider using other e-marketing techniques such as email, e-newsletters
or e-postcards, writing online articles, maintaining a blog, utilizing social
networking (such as Facebook or MySpace).
You can incorporate RSS feeds you’re your site or provide a feed from
your blog. Invite others to link to your
website. The more links you have back to
your site, the better your chances are of being found by the search engines.
3. Keep your customers coming back – Become the authority
on topics relevant to your industry and provide features to your website that offer
value to visitors. Some ideas include: relevant articles, studies or a free
e-book they can download. Make a special
“web-only” offer, have a contest or offer free tools from your site.
4. Take ownership and get buy-in – Whether you outsource
your website maintenance, decide to keep it up yourself or assign an employee
to do so, someone needs to be responsible for keeping it updated and ensuring
it continues to run smoothly.
5. Add and USE tracking and analytics tools – How many
visitors are coming to your site? How
long do they stay on it? Which pages are
most popular? What search engines are
driving the visitors to your website?
What keywords are they searching?
Tracking and analytics systems (like Google analytics) provide you with answers
to these questions and more. This
information is critical in helping you update content or modify promotions you
may be running.
Rambo Designs can help you keep your website and online presence current. Please visit the Services & Samples section of this website for more details and to see our portfolio. Call (540) 337-1420 to schedule a free consultation today.
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