With this in mind, here are five online marketing mistakes that almost all businesses make.
Building a poor quality website
One…
With this in mind, here are five online marketing mistakes that almost all businesses make.
Building a poor quality website
One of the most common mistakes small businesses make is to assume that any web presence is a good web presence. In many cases this means that they use the cheapest option to develop their websites and, in worst case scenarios, believe that their business can be represented adequately by software that offer free website building.
Unfortunately, more often than not this leads to the website appearing outdated to potential customers, who will simply take their business elsewhere.
Failing to secure proper hosting
Web hosting is an extremely important, yet often underestimated, aspect of any online marketing plan. Webmasters should always look to host their websites with a host that can provide an extremely high level of uptime and does not have a reputation for hosting poor quality websites.
Google considers the ability to easily access your website as an extremely important ranking factor in their algorithm, so if your website experiences significant downtime or is extremely slow to load this may have a detrimental effect on your overall rankings. Web hosting experts from Europe warn that in worst case scenarios webmasters who have used free web hosting services may even see their website disappear from search results altogether if the server their site is hosted on also hosts a large number of poor quality websites. Guilt by association is not something that any business owner needs to deal with.
Using a poor quality SEO firm
Any webmaster who is aiming to secure solid rankings in search engines must make it a priority to examine the terms and conditions laid out by those search engines. Taking Google as an example, they have a large amount of documentation that details exactly what they look for in a website and the kinds of behaviours that can lead to a website being punished or demoted in search rankings.
Unfortunately there are a number of SEO companies that use fairly unscrupulous tactics in an effort to get a website ranked as soon as possible, so having the knowledge of what should and shouldn’t be done is critical before you hand any of your money over to a third party.
Not examining the statistics
Any website, no matter how good it is, contains areas that could be improved. Services such as Google Analytics and other analytic tools provide a wealth of data about what potential customers are doing once they have accessed your website.
This should be used to determine your content plan going forward and to pick out areas of the website that are not performing well. For example, examining the data may show that customers are bouncing away from a particular page of your website more so than any other, which would be cause to investigate why customer’s leave that page so quickly.
A poor call to action
Almost any business that owns a website is looking to use that website to convert users into customers. However many believe that simply having a contact form is enough and that people will automatically know where to go to get in touch.
Webmasters must be sure to keep users aware of areas of the site that they can use to make a purchase or contact the company and the website’s navigation should be set up in such a way as to make this information easily accessible at all times. Visible prompts, often placed in the heading or footer of the website, can be used to remind a visitor how to contact the business if they need to.
Follow these steps and you are sure to be on the right track when it comes to a successful online marketing campaign. There are other potential pitfalls along the way of course, but with time, effort and dedication your website can truly begin serving your business.
