Website Marketing Plan

We talk to a number of small companies, and it is obvious that very few of them have a website marketing plan. Some might think they have a plan, they throw a few hundred or few thousand dollars at pay per click advertising, some even buy SEO services. But very few of them have a website marketing plan.

We just did a project for a small industrial company that gets most of their leads from a paper-based directory that has been printed in their industry for many, many years. It is quite expensive to advertise in this directory but for many years it was worth the expense of purchasing an ad. But even in the industrial world, times are changing, and many of their potential clients are now going online. So suddenly, this 25+ year company is losing market share because their business has changed to an online environment with new competitors that have entered the market.

This comment from the owner sums up their search engine ranking position. He said,”the only traffic we get to our website is from people that already know about us”. So even though they have several factors working in their favor – an established website on an aged domain, with great content and even a fair amount of backlinks, they are not getting any traffic. The reason become obvious once we began the initial SEO audit – from an SEO perspective, nothing really had ever been done on their website. The result was that their website was buried so far down in the search engines that it was impossible to find.

There are many companies that find themselves in a similar situation – they have nice websites, great content, and every other available bell and whistle. Everything that is except traffic.

For this particular client, the initial website marketing plan was simple, and included the following:

• As with any SEO project, we started with keyword research to find the best possible keywords
• After the keyword list was established, existing pages were optimized for the targeted keywords where possible
• New content pages were created for targeted keywords that were found but where no content existed
• To build a mailing list we developed a lead capture page to collect name, address, email and phone numbers for newsletters and other special offers
• Added a blog to the existing website so that new, fresh content could be added on a regular basis
• Established a social network presence and started submitting content to social bookmarking sites
• Began an effort to post online press releases on a consistent basis when there was news-worthy information available
• Started syndicating the blog content to RSS feeds and other syndication options to spread the content and to spread back links
• Established a consistent link building strategy to target pages on the website

During the initial phase, the goal was to get the website properly indexed in the search engines and start building page rank for the targeted keywords. This was a great improvement as now at least people who were searching for a particular keyword phrase could at least the client’s website and make contact. The next step is to migrate to an ecommerce platform, add lots of original video content, become much more active in social networking, and more.

The primary point to note is that a website marketing plan takes time to implement and will always be a moving target. The most important thing to is get started with a website marketing plan and let it evolve over time as your needs and budget require.

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