Marketing Your Small Business Online

Before launching your campaign, we take a few steps that will maximize its effectiveness:

• Competitive Analysis
  We start by analyzing a few of your top competitors. We find them by searching Google for the keywords you think you want to rank for, then observe what they’re doing to market themselves online. Are they running pay-per-click (PPC) ads? Is their website friendly and easy to navigate? How strong is their value proposition? Are they engaging with customers via social media? How long has their website been around, and how many backlinks does it have? If necessary, we’ll work with you to adjust your strategy to make sure you won’t be overlooked when you compete with these businesses head-to-head.

   

• Keyword research
  When we did your competitive analysis we were searching for words we thought people were typing. But what are they really typing? You may think most people know you as a “personal injury attorney,” but in reality, the search data may show that most people are looking for something more specific like “dog bite lawyer.” There are many different tools that you can use to help you brainstorm synonyms, misspellings, or different angles to investigate. There are then many more tools that will help you gather search volumes (such as the Google keyword tool). One of our favorite approaches is to run an actual PPC campaign for a few weeks on a variety of different keywords and see which ads perform well in order to inform our keyword targeting recommendations. The goal of keyword research is to determine which keywords and phrases will be most profitable for you to rank for on search engines.

   

• Conversion rate optimization
  The next step is to take a close look at the experience a visitor has when they get to your website. It does no good to bring in a potential customer only to have them scared off because they are confused or lost on your website. For conversion rate optimization, we perform a 25 point check on various aspects of your website like readability, how fast it loads, how easy it is to navigate, how well the content is written and so forth. Before driving any traffic to your site, it’s important to make sure that it will convert as much incoming traffic as possible into new customers.