Your site is live, you’re rapidly becoming a marketing guru, now’s the time to flex your Internet muscles!
The biggest problem for new, and often existing websites, is getting traffic (or visitors) to them. The adage of “Build it and they will come” is often met by the Internet’s stark response of “No they won’t”. The fear is that your website may well become the Internet’s best kept secret unless people actually visit it. If you built a hotel in the middle of nowhere with no roads, signs or advertising you wouldn’t exactly expect it to be a roaring success. The same is true of the Internet, your website is in the middle of cyber-nowhere until you build online roads, signage and advertising.
Google AdWords is a powerful marketing system which solves the traffic problem by instantly bringing relevant prospects to your website (a huge bonus if you’ve just launched your website). You do have to pay for the traffic but because the system is so measurable you can quickly get your campaign into profit. If done well this can be the cash machine for your business and that’s not hyperbole, that’s a fact.
How AdWords works is very simple. You enter into the system adverts which are displayed whenever someone types in keywords that you think are relevant to your product or service. When someone types that keyword or phrase into Google your advert will appear. If they then click on your advert they will be taken to a page on your website. You only pay Google when someone clicks on your advert.
Although AdWords is a well-known system many businesses look to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to attract visitors (partly because it generates free rather than paid traffic and partly because web designers are keen to sell these services on the back of a site build). However, there are two key reasons why you don’t want to do this just yet:
- It can takes months for you to get ranked highly on search engines (especially if you are a brand new website, i.e. you haven’t rebuilt an existing one).
- You won’t know if the keywords you choose to optimise your site for will actually make you any money.
This last point is the really critical one. Say you spend £1500 optimising your site for a keyword. You have to assume that the traffic from the keyword is both relevant and commercial – in other words you’re going to earn money from it. But how do you know if that’s true unless you have already tested traffic from that keyword and found that to be the case? This is the beauty of Google AdWords. It gives you the ability to test the quality of traffic from thousands of keywords and see exactly how many sales you make from each. This knowledge enables you to cherry pick the most financially productive keywords and SEO them safe in the knowledge that the traffic from those keywords will convert into customers – instant traffic!
Next week we’ll take a look at the next step in the Blueprint – Building Lasting Relationships with Your Customers.
