Online marketing has developed way beyond using Google adwords to drive traffic to your website, although still an effective strategy, it by all means is not the only one.
Your business will need to adapt if it is to survive in the glut of online competition, keeping ahead of the curve is not just another marketing strategy, it is an essential strategy.
Once your business is online you need to drive targeted traffic, prospects and ultimately sales for your product or service to survive. New online entities such as video, podcasting and social media give a new and in my opinion welcome, dimension to the basic need for the lifeblood of the web, traffic.
Let’s start with Google, the most popular starting point of your customers. How do you get to the top of Google? Unfortunately if you are in a highly competitive business area this can be a mammoth task on its’ own. Google has traditionally ranked sites based on many different elements such as age, domain age, incoming links, location of web host, structured silos of your website, popularity and many many other factors.
Google has re-structured its’ algorithms to include their ‘other’ databases. The Google search engine consists of many separate databases of content. These are Google Images, Google News, Google Video, Google Local, Google Base, Google Blogs, Google Books and Google Code.
But the vast majority of users simply did not use these databases of information.
Universal search solves this problem by taking the results from these other databases, also known as ‘verticals’ and includes them in the main search results.
By integrating these elements into your overall strategy you stand to get your website visited via the backdoor through video, podcasts, images, blogs, satellite sites and many other pockets of sub-content. Social media also plays an increasingly important part – no it’s not just for teenagers – businesses and entrepreneurs and using it to network with their counterparts and their customers and their customers are starting to expect it!
Satellite content sites such as wetpaint, squidoo and hubpages all provide powerful backdoors to your main sales hub, providing it’s done right, as well as powerful back links in the eyes of Google.
When you have your website online and revving to go the work remember this the work has actually only just begun.
Quite often this question comes up and is something we’d encourage business owners to seriously consider as part of their online marketing strategy. Email Newsletters compliment your website or blog nicely and can drive traffic back to them and help the longivity of your customer relationships.