Do You Need To Market Your Website?

January 31st, 2016

Website marketing. SEO. Search engine optimization.

These are terms that I was surprised to find out most of my clients didn't know what they were! I've been doing website creation and Internet marketing for so long I forgot that the average person doesn't know how to speak computer-ese. Or Internet marketing-ese. Or SEO-ese.

I start talking about this subject and eyes start glazing over. Hmm......lol. Well, having a company website is great but having a high quality website that gets "found on the Internet" is more important! Not all websites are created equal. A high quality website should have on-page SEO built into the site. Optimized meta tags, optimized title tags, optimized description tags, keyword density etc. See what I mean? Am I still speaking English....lol.

Plus, images should be optimized for faster page load. CSS should be compressed and minified. Gzip compression should be used. I could go on and on but your eyes would probably glaze over. The point is, that there is so much that goes into a high quality web site that Google will find relevant.

But this blog is about marketing your website. On-page SEO is the first step in a good marketing plan for your website. Once the on page aspect is taken care of now we need to "market" the website. Local SEO is different from national or even global SEO. Most of the websites I manage are local so I will focus on this area in this blog.

Claiming your website on Google+Local (Google My Business) is one thing you can do to market your site (the correct category listing in Google My Business is critical). Getting your site onto other directories like Yelp, Manta, Merchant Circle, just to name a few, is one step to perform. Getting citations and back links is important. These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to marketing (advertising) your website. 

If you were to put up a brick and mortar store would you then advertise your new store? If not, how is anybody going to know that the store is there? Or how will people patronize the store if they don't even know it exists?  Marketing your website is just as critical for the same reasons. SEO is the number one method of advertising your web site. It's very important to get visits and hence new business.

In conclusion, of course you need to advertise (market) your web site! How else will people know how and where to find you? One caveat. If your only reason for having a website is because you feel like you need an online presence (and really, doesn't everybody?) and don't want your company website to generate new business then I guess you don't need to market your site. Okay?

Nuff said for now, eh?