Brick and mortar stores are undoubtedly benefiting from having an additional channel to sell. Online stores are essential to increasing market coverage as it widens the business’ visibility. Still, many businesses fail to prioritize optimization of their websites and treat these digital brochures the same way they treat printed leaflets, hoping that the more leaflets are given away, the more chances of people hitting the store to buy the products. Without SEO or marketing automation, these websites are wasted investments.
If your business already has an online store, best to think about how you can maximize the site to realize optimum return on investment. Below are some tips to keep your website relevant and make it a profit-generating channel:
- Understand the way your market “searches” for you in search engines (such as google). Remember that your product names are irrelevant — nobody remembers all the names of your products and they don’t search for them directly. Research about the types of keywords your customers type in that search bar and understand their intention when buying.
- Make your website content relevant with these search words. It’s important that your keywords don’t get stuck in a file and are implemented within your pages. Unless they’re in the right places, you’re notgonnaget the search engines to bring your site up the ranks.
- Set a sales process and make sureyou’rewebsite’s part of the lead generation strategy. If you don’t find your website in your sales process, it means that you’re using it as a traditional marketing tool which it definitely should not be.
- Create a schedule for regular content updating. Not all businesses have the luxury of having a content writer or a marketing team to regularly update the content of the website. If your business does not have one, you might as well make sure you strictly schedule a content update which you will be committed to. Whether it’s writing a blog or updating details of your products, or creating a new page for your service, search engineshave toknow that your website is not a dead pool of irrelevant stuff. To beat the bots, you have to be fully committed to content updating.
- If all else fails, consider outsourcing the work. With the rise of third-party providers for web maintenance, SEO services, and content writing, small and medium-sized businesses are highly encouraged to outsource the work. Businesses are then assured that the work can be done by experts, or at least by those who dedicate at least 8 hours a day to understand what works and what doesn’t in this specific area of your business. CMSIT provides web maintenance and SEO solutions to companies in Australia.
Remember that your time as the business manager is valuable. You have the option to do the work yourself or outsource it and get additional support. Either way, the result should be a regularly-updated and relevant website that generates business leads for you.
