SEO and Internet Marketing - Taking an Holistic Approach to Website Promotion

Promoting your website online is never an easy task and being successful at doing this can often be the difference between huge success and terrible failure for many businesses, especially for smaller companies on a limited budget.

There are many SEO’s and Internet marketing companies around and it is pretty much a market that has been saturated by companies and individuals that promise the earth but in reality, deliver relatively little in terms of conversions, results and revenue.

I personally believe that you have to take the "holistic" approach which means incorporating many different off site website promotion techniques and a number of on-site website design elements.

But what do I mean by "taking an holistic approach"?

One thing I have come to realize over the years is that although SEO is a great traffic generator, alone it is not enough. You can drive lots of traffic to a site by getting it ranked well in the search engines, but this does not produce the most important factor, which is visitor conversions.

Robert Griggs specializes in small business SEO and Internet Marketing and helps small businesses to leverage the power of the internet in order to promote their business online.

Ultimately it boils down to a few important aspects for the client and they are, brand awareness, authority and revenue for their business. It’s great getting good rankings, but if the visitors do not convert, you are throwing your time and your clients money down the cyber drain.

You see, it’s not just about ranking well; it’s about a lot more than this. It’s about brand awareness, establishing your site as an authority in your niche, click throughs, buzz, retaining your visitors and establishing yourself and your site as the market leader within your niche.

So some of the most important aspects of taking the "holistic approach" are:-

Great Website Design

Your website (once someone finds it) is the first impression that a visitor gets of your business. It needs to be clear, easy to navigate, have good internal linking, have good visible contact information, call to action and good copy writing.

Many people go with flashy sites with banners, animated gifts, flash movies and a whole host of other "distractions". Ultimately, you want to sell to your visitors, not entertain them. If they want entertaining, they will watch TV or visit youtube. Keep it simple with good navigation.

Great Content

This is another stumbling block for many sites. Content is king and always will be. The net is one big database for information retrieval purposes. We all want knowledge, information and answers to questions that we have. It’s your job to provide those answers in the form of rich authoritative content. If you keep providing great unique content, your visitors will see you as an authority and a repository for great information and ultimately you will keep them coming back.

Content is not only found on your site though. There are other ways of marketing your site online including article marketing, press releases, content exchange, newsletters, email marketing, social networking/bookmarking and blogging. All are a great way for you to reach out to your potential customers and draw them back to your site.

Call To Action

By understanding what your visitors really want, you are able to answer the questions that they have. Call To Action (CTA) is a critical element to site design and is one that many sites fail to provide. By using effective copy writing and strong calls to action within your sites most important selling pages, you are able to pull a visitor into that sales funnel and ultimately sell them your products or services.

Originality

If your site doesn’t have any aspect of originality and is unable to stand out from thousands of similar sites, you are in trouble. Your job is to try and differentiate your site and business from the many others within your niche and industry. So ask yourself "How do we differentiate ourselves from the competition?", Or "What is my UVP?"(Unique Value Proposition)

Most SEO’s just drive traffic to a site and then have trouble working out why the customer does not stay with them for very long as they do not have the right perception of what SEO will provide them with. They do not understand that it’s an SEO’s job to bring them traffic and not to convert it. They then feel that the SEO has not provided their end of the bargain.

By adopting a holistic approach, you become less dependent on monitoring rankings and more focused on providing quality content, establishing authority, converting visitors and bring them back to your site time and time again.

If you are an SEO, you will find that you provide a service that is more aligned to your clients expectations that will not only bring traffic to the site, but also help to convert those visitors into paying customers.

Robert Griggs specializes in SEO and Internet Marketing for small business websites to help them leverage the power of the internet. For more information please visit the SEO Services Spain website.