Everybody wants more visitors to their website. Marketing is after all a numbers game, and no matter how attractive or informative your website is, if you are not getting enough of the right kind of visitors the site is never going to be an effective marketing channel for your business.

There are many ways to get your website better known – both online and offline. Let’s start with the offline marketing of your website. You want to make sure you have your website address on everything. Here’s a checklist for you to get started with:

Add your website address to:

Number plates, car signage, building signage, pens, letterheads, business cards, compliment slips, carry bags, television adverts, print adverts, radio adverts, all promotional materials, clothing, name badges, billboards, and anything else you can think of.

Online marketing of your website:

Social media

If you have a personal profile on Facebook (www.facebook.com) or other social media sites, make sure you add your business website address. Consider creating a Facebook group, or a Facebook page for your business, or try out Facebook advertising (which is pay per click). Sign up to LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) – this is a site for business professionals to network with each other. In addition, sign up to Twitter (www.twitter.com) – this is a popular site overseas but not so well known in New Zealand, although it is starting to get some publicity here (www.stuff.co.nz is now on Twitter at http://twitter.com/NZStuff and so are the Christchurch Police at http://twitter.com/nzpolice_chch ). With Twitter you publish short status updates about what you are doing. So the CEO of your company could twitter about the business happenings. Don’t think you have the time to twitter? Well, you can use your blog to automatically update your Twitter account every time a new blog post is published. And you can access Twitter using an iPhone or other mobile device.

Link building

Many websites are discovered via links from other websites. The place to start is with the New Zealand search engines and website directories. Most web directories will list your site for free (though many will insist on a link back). We recommend you create a links page on your site for this purpose so you are ready to place links on your site to other sites. To find New Zealand website directories run a search in Google for “new zealand web directories” as new directory sites come online every few months.

Not only does link building get you traffic from the actual link, but the number of links you have (and the quality of those links) can help with your rankings in Google, so it certainly pays to get as many good links as you can. Think carefully about the sites you swap links with though, as to get the maximum benefit out of reciprocal linking the site you swap with needs to complement yours in some way (for example if you are a real estate agent swap links with a law firm). We recommend you stay away from sites that send out automated link request on your behalf – these are very annoying for website owners and go straight to the junk box.

Search engine optimisation

By far the best way to promote your website is to have the site rank highly in the search engines. Your goal should be to rank in the top 10 for your primary keyword phrases. By keyword phrases we mean the main words that describe what you do or what you offer. For example if you are a motel in Christchurch your phrases might be “Christchurch motel”, “motel accommodation Christchurch”, etc. There’s a lot to search engine optimisation and in particular a lot of misinformation online about what to do, but essentially it boils down to making a website more ‘relevant’ in the search results. A good place to start is by reviewing the wording on your site. Have you included your keywords in your copy and used synonyms for those keywords? If you are targeting a particular market place (say North Americans) make sure you use words they would search for – a classic is ‘vacation’ instead of ‘holiday’. Common spelling mistakes are another source of traffic to a site, but we don’t recommend you add the mistakes to your content; they need to go into your metadata.

Tracking your marketing efforts

Remember to track what you are doing so you can measure its effectiveness. Monitor your website statistics every month and watch for increases in traffic, check which sites are referring visitors, review the keywords used in the search engines that resulted in a visit and track how many visitors Google is sending to your site each month. Most web stats packages will record this information, so check with your web company. If you don’t have a stats package with your hosting you can sign up for Google Analytics for free and have a tracking code added to your site.

Good luck with your marketing efforts, and if you would like some assistance please contact one of our web team on 03 366 3340, as we can assist you with search engine optimisation, link building and Facebook marketing.