Even if a business is not yet involved in e-commerce, all businesses these days need to own a website, it is almost impossible for even the smallest company to look professional without some sort of web presence. Therefore it is really important to have an attractive, easy to read, easy to navigate and above all informative website that tells your customers or clients what your business is about. In business today rather than asking for a brochure a lot of potential customers will ask you for your website address. This is particularly important if you plan to add an online store facility such as Zen Cart in the near future.
What happens then if you don’t have a website? Well quite frankly in this day and age no one will take you seriously. Even worse than that though is having a website that is completely useless and doesn’t do its job which should be to help “sell” either goods or your business services? Any website is almost pointless without plenty of targeted quality traffic. Creating the actual website, no matter how beautiful, is only the beginning of a serious internet marketing campaign. Attracting any visitors at all, let alone those who are interested in what you have to offer, is much more difficult than most people realise, sadly this is why so many websites fail in their quest to increase profits.
You can’t afford to let your competitors get ahead by having a greater share of targeted web visitors than you. Remember the joy of a website is that it is accessible 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can generate qualified leads to your business even while you sleep.
A properly constructed website, with heaps of targeted traffic, should act like a built in salesman that you don’t have to pay but who returns a huge return on investment for you and your business. So having established that creating and submitting a website to the search engines is only half the battle how do you get that much needed traffic to your site?
There are several options which largely depend on your budget. You can for instance pay for traffic by using a Google AdWords campaign, this guarantees traffic but can run through your marketing budget like a hot knife through butter.
Another alternative is to employ the services of a professional company to help you or even better if you are on a restricted budget you can do it yourself by ensuring you have plenty of keyword-rich content on your site and heaps of good quality incoming links.
Outsourcing the job to a marketing or SEO company is not always the easy option, mainly because you have no real idea of their true worth until you have already paid them and have to simply sit and wait for the traffic to arrive. If the whole exercise is a failure you are highly unlikely to see any of your money back.
There are all too many self-proclaimed “gurus” on the web who would like you to believe that there is a secret formula for generating traffic and that only they know this “secret” but they will use the formula to promote your site – for a price. Regrettably most of them have no more knowledge than what is available free on the Internet and with time and patience you can in fact learn and apply it yourself.
So if you’re struggling to get your site ranked well in the search engines or are looking to start a new website, do some research into SEO (search engine optimisation). There is plenty of online information available to help you get started in the right direction. There are no short cuts or magic tricks when it comes to ranking well in the search engines; just well-written quality content with relevant linking that relates well to your own site.
To conclude then – it would seem that it is very important to have a high profile business presence of the web but it is even more important that your website converts thousands of annual visitors into a high percentage of loyal customers.
