Ensuring that your website is successful in 2020 means putting in a lot of work and fighting to make yourself visible amongst a huge amount of competition. Every business in your industry and niche will have a website, and they will all be wanting to snag the same target audience as you. So how do you make yourself stand out?
Use Your Email Marketing List
Many people today don’t realise the relevance of email marketing today, thinking that it is a relic from a previous digital age. Whilst newer forms of marketing are taking the foreground for many businesses, those in the know realise the power of email marketing, and that is just as effective today as it has been in the past.
Email marketing is one of the more versatile online marketing approaches, allowing brands to leverage their email subscribers in lots of different ways. One of the ways in which you can use your email list is to encourage email subscribers to share your content with their friends and family. This will require your existing subscribers to visit your site, as well as the people that they share with, generating even more leads.
You should also use your email marketing software to track and analyse how effective your email campaigns are.
Update Your Priority Pages
You can identify your priority pages – the pages on your site which are performing the best – using Google Analytics. This will help you to work out which pages need tweaking and updating but can also help you to improve on your more effective pages as well.
Use search terms in Google that you would hope people are using to find your webpage. This will help you to see where your own page ranks against your competition, and where you are showing up on the results pages overall.
Research has shown that most people (up to 95% in some studies) will only click on results from the first page of results. And the first result alone gets a large percentage of those clicks. However, being on the second page isn’t the end of the world and knowing who is ranking better than you can help you to learn where you are going wrong and how you can update your priority pages in order to improve your own rankings.
Look at how their pages differ from yours and investigate what is different.
Perhaps they simply update more often than you do, or their content is more relevant and detailed. It could be something as simple as changing the keywords in your metatags. Once you know what you need to do to update your site you should easily be able to bring in new website traffic as well as improve your Google rankings.
Create Live Videos
There are plenty of social media platforms that have introduced a live feature in recent years. Amongst the most popular are:
- Facebook Live
- YouTube Live
- Instagram Live Stories
You should already have at least one of these social media platforms, making it easy to start livestreaming to your followers. You can use livestreams to chat to customers, take questions and ask for feedback, make announcements or demonstrate new products.
It is not necessarily important what you use your livestreams for, more that you make them regular, engaging and worth your customers getting involved in. Make sure that your livestream directs viewers to a landing page on your site as its overarching CTA to ensure higher web traffic.
Use Social Media
Whilst social media was a critical element of any business’s web presence a few years ago, many companies are backing off from using it as much today. Social media has consistently-changing algorithms that are currently more geared towards social and casual interactions, rather than those suitable for businesses. This means that for many businesses it is hard to get the right feedback from customers.
People scroll through their social media to engage in fun conversation and read updates, so you’ll have to do something special to get them to click away from their newsfeed. Many businesses find that posts which require an action to be taken on the website can encourage users to click away, such as voting in a poll or entering a contest.
For others, it may be useful simply to use your social media platforms to promote your website and products/services. Many B2C companies find image-driven social media platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram achieve better engagement than others.
Consider Guest Blogging
As with social media, guest blogging is a marketing technique that many consider to be obsolete. However, this is the very thing that will help you to get ahead of the competition! You can use guest blogging in two ways. Either write a guest blog yourself for a popular site within your industry or niche, drawing your company and website to the attention of this site’s fans and followers, or get a popular influencer or brand from within your industry to write a blog that you can feature on your site.
Either way, both yourself and the other brand will be able to cross-promote each other’s sites when advertising the post and help yourselves to each other’s customer base.
Keep Your Site Fast And Responsive
It is amazing how easy it is to lose potential customers simply because your site is slow and difficult to use. Internet users today are used to being able to click through sites in mere moments, so if your landing page takes more than a couple of seconds to load then you will see sky-high bounce rates.
Thanks to the wide variety of sites available for every niche, customers also know that if they do navigate away from your site they’ll be able to find something similar and just as relevant to what they are looking for in seconds, so their commitment to seeing it through with your site is very low.
Test your site regularly to make sure that it is loading quickly, that it is accessible and easily viewable across a range of devices, including all types of smartphone.
What’s Next
Coordinating your online advertising alongside running your company is a juggling act that most SME’s have trouble accomplishing. There just isn’t enough time in the day for many business owners.
If you find yourself in this position then the team at MaxWeb are here to help. Online marketing is what we do, day in day out, for hundreds of clients across the UK and we would welcome the opportunity to discuss what we can do for you.
Why not give us a call on 0151 652 4777 or email info@maxwebsolutions.co.uk to find out more.
Posted on Friday, February 21st, 2020 in Digital Marketing.
