4: What is the best way to promote my website?

This depends on a number of factors the most important of which is where your customers are looking for your services. The latest statistics suggest that over 80% of people use the internet by default when looking for products or services. If you are not sure whether this is true for your industry, try looking for your services online. If you can see some of your competitors, this may suggest the internet is a good move for you. Do your keyword research using Google Keyword Tool and see how many people are searching for your services, this should give you a strong indication of how much business you may be losing.

Both PPC (Pay Per Click) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation also known as Organic) are effective methods of driving traffic to your website. In order to decide which of them is best to use, you need to understand the strength and limitations of each so they can be used optimally.

SEO is good when you want consistent results and it has a relatively long gestation period. The holy grail of SEO is position one on the first page of Google, it is the most dominant search engine. However, getting to position one will not happen overnight and does take planning, strategy and investment over the long term. Position one on Google is worth 30% more than position two even for lead generation sites. Simply put, you get more people clicking on your website than your competitors. Once your site gets to position one on Google you will get sustained traffic, of course you have to maintain that position as competitors will be nipping at your heals. We won’t get into the intricacies of SEO, but in our opinion you should have a strategy for moving up to the top position of Google if you want sustained enquiries.

PPC (Pay Per Click) is advertising and can be incredibly effective in generating traffic to your website. It is called ‘pay per click’ because you have to pay for every user who clicks on the ad you are promoting, unlike SEO where every click is effectively free. Here are some guidelines on when you should use PPC.

1. When you want immediate results. Fast results can be delivered by PPC and I mean very fast. You can set up a campaign at 9AM and start generating traffic by 10AM. If your bids are high enough to merit priority placement and it has a good quality score you can be number one in a short period of time.
2. Promoting a time sensitive offer. Marketing your services or an event that will expire in a matter of days or weeks can be challenging. If you are holding a seminar and you create an SEO page a few weeks before the event, chances are the page will not show up until after the event. Promoting an offer or an event that will expire in a couple of days is best done with PPC.
3. When highly targeted traffic is needed. PPC marketing will allow you to narrow down your prospects based on their demographic data. Let’s say you are a dentist in Fareham and you know that people will travel 25 miles of your location to visit your clinic. PPC will allow you to narrow down your advertising so that only people within your geographic location can see your ads. Many other PPC platforms, like social media sites, allow you to promote to the age range, gender, income bracket, education level, and even marital status of the people who will be able to view your ad. Popular social media sites like Facebook also allow you to target people based on their hobbies. These make PPC a powerful way of reaching the small band of people your business needs, and leading them to your website.
4. When your website isn’t designed for SEO. If your website is not SEO friendly (search engines cannot index it properly) then potential visitors cannot find your site organically. SEO requires content that is optimised for the search terms visitors will use to look for your services. A good example of this is Flash websites. Search Engines have problems indexing websites built with Flash and unfortunately some web developers still like build websites this way. Most of the time the customer is not aware of the limitations until it is too late. If this is your situation then PPC is your best option.

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