Nearly every business owner considers a website a requirement, but what good is a website that no one visits?
How Visitors Arrive at a Popular Website
There are a lot of ways visitors can find your website. The most important methods for apparel vendors are:
- Direct Reference. The visitor typed in the URL or followed a link.
- Paid Search. The visitor clicked on an advertisement placed on a search engine results page.
- House E-mail Lists. The visitor clicked on a link in an e-mail sent by the vendor. The visitor had previously signed up for the vendor's email list.
- Organic or Natural Search. The visitor clicked on a link in the main body of a search engine results page.
- Affiliates. The visitor clicked on a link on a remote site. The vendor had agreed to pay the remote site a referral fee.
About 28% of visitors to a typical site will arrive by direct reference, either by typing a URL into the browser or by following a link. You can get more direct reference visitors through link building, which is getting other websites to link to yours. As a vendor, your most powerful link-building allies are your retailers.
Another 28% of visitors come to commercial websites through paid advertisements in search engines, and 17% come thorough natural search results. Although paying for advertising in a search engine is easier than getting high natural search rankings, both methods require that you have a detailed understanding of your target demographics, including which keywords people are searching for and what they want to click on.
About 16% of visitors to a commercial website will come through links in an e-mail that was sent to a house list. A "house list" is a list of e-mail addresses you collect through an opt-in collection form. Sending e-mail to a house list is the most cost-efficient way to generate new sales, but it does not help with acquiring new customers.
About 12% of visitors to commercial websites arrive through affiliate links. An affiliate program allows publishers, like blogs and magazines and other content websites, to put links to products on their websites. When visitors to the content website click on a link, they are taken to a website where they can buy the product, and if they buy it, the content website gets an affiliate payment. This form of promotion is only useful if your website has an e-commerce component.
Start Improving Your Website Now
Properly promoting a website requires dedication and expertise, so the core recommendation is to hire an interactive marketing firm. You can get started on your own, however, and with some work you can make substantial improvements to your website.
- Assess the quality of your current website.
- Analyze your improvements to track your progress.
- Pick your keywords to ensure you are targeting the right consumers.
- Implement baseline improvements and add content to attract visitors and improve your search ranking.
- Collect e-mail addresses from your most interested consumers.
- Build links from other websites to yours.
Here are a few links that cover basic website promotion and search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing topics:
Assess: Is your current website any good?
The first thing you should do is assess the quality of your website with Website Grader. This tool will give you a score from 0 to 100, indicating the quality of your website with respect to the factors that search engines use to rank your website. Good grades are 75 or above, and grades below 50 indicate significant problems. (Many vendor websites that Clarinova has analyzed score 30 and below.)
While a poor score on Website Grader means that your site needs improvement, a good score doesn't mean you have nothing to fix. It just means that the problems aren't critical.
Analyze: How will you know if you improve?
If you are making improvements to a website, you will want to know how you are performing, so install these two analytics systems to track your progress:
Both of these tools will require that you create an account and cut and paste javascript code from their websites into yours, so the javascript appears on every page. This is a very simple task for your web developer and should take no more than 30 minutes.
Google Analytics will give you statistics about how visitors come to your website and what they do while they are there. Quantcast provides details of the demographics of your visitors and what other websites they visit.
Mahalo has a good step-by-step guide to setting up and using Google Analytics.
Pick your keywords to target the right consumers
After you've graded your website and set up analytics, you are ready to start improving your website. Most forms of promotion will require that you have a detailed understanding of what people in your target demographic are searching for. There are a lot of tools that can tell you what people search for and can suggest other keywords you should consider.
You will want to select keywords that:
- describe your business
- are commonly searched for
- don't return a lot of websites
Unfortunately, it is rare that you can optimize on all three criteria, so you will have make some compromises.
Some tools you should consider using are:
Implement baseline improvements and add content
With a set of keywords, you can begin making basic improvements to your website. The basic set of improvements include getting your keywords into specific places on each of your pages:
- Title
- Description
- Keywords
- Headings
- Content
In short, all of these improvements are about the content on each page.
For many vendors, the first problem is that most web pages don't have any content, because you've implemented the website in Flash. Flash websites are pretty and engaging, but they are nearly invisible to search engines. If you want to attract more visitors, you need to have regular web pages.
Your website should have a web page for every product you sell, and every page should include:
- the product name
- a description of the product
It's even better if every product page includes a list of the stores that carry the product.
Collect e-mail addresses to keep in contact with your best customers
The most cost-effective way to make an additional sale is through e-mail marketing. With e-mail marketing, you are sending e-mail to previous customers who like your brand enough to give you their e-mail addresses.
There are several excellent services that can help you with e-mail marketing and can even give you the widget to add to your website to collect e-mail addresses. Two popular companies are:
Build links pointing to your website
One of the factors that search engines like Google use to determine where a web page will appear in a list of results is the number of sites that link to the page. In the same way that you would prefer a doctor who gets the most recommendations from your friends, Google prefers web pages that have a lot of links.
Link building is a discipline all on its own.
An apparel vendor's most significant ally for building links should be the vendor's retailers. E-mail all of your vendors who have websites and ask them to create a link back to your website.
Another common tactic for building links is creating website content, such as papers or blog posts, that other people find valuable enough to link to. This content is often called link bait, and you may be reading such a document right now.
Link building links:
Here's another free tip on how to get started with link building: put a link to this guide on your website. Good karma!
Get Started Today
These steps are a good start that will take your website from being difficult to find to at least being visible in search engines. When you've worked through the items on this list, you should be able to get a Website Grader grade of at least 70.
Once you've taken care of the basics, if you want to drive more traffic to your site, you should consider hiring a consultant to review your business plans to craft a strategy that can be implemented by professional Internet marketers. Clarinova can help!
Important next step: sign up for Clarinova's e-mail announcements to get notification of new website strategy guides and seminars in your area.
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