"If you build it..."

"If you build it, they will come." This mantra is used for just about everything. As motivation to build a baseball field in the popular 1989 film, this turned out to be true—he built it, they came. Unfortunately, in the online world it's not that simple.  Building a website is a start; it is simply the means to an end.  It is not the end.

where are the customers?

One misconception is that the World Wide Web is like the Yellow Pages®—simply being there means consumers can find you. Companies sometimes spend hundreds or thousands of dollars building custom websites only to find they have no visitors and no return on their investment. The sad reality is that you can build a website and never have a single consumer find it.

Consumers find your website in one of two ways. First, you can tell them about it. A sign in your store or a URL printed on your business card can tell people where to find you online. But if the purpose of your website is to help people find you, then telling them about your website after they've found you is somewhat pointless.

The second way consumers find your website is through search engines such as Google™. When someone searches for a product or service that you provide, the search results page may provide a link to your site. Whether or not it does depends on several factors, the most important being whether or not the search engine knows your site exists. Search engines don't always automatically know when new sites come online. They need to be told. You do this either by providing them with the URL for your site, by having a link to your site on another site that they already know about, or by advertising with them. The last option is the only one that is guaranteed to get you listed, but you'll have to pay them for this listing. Other than those three methods, search engines have no way of knowing about your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Internet marketing has brought about new concepts in advertising. One of these is the concept of search engine optimization. The goal of every search engine is to give consumers a good experience. This means providing them with links to relevant websites. A person looking for cameras should not be sent to a website selling pillows. The sites presented by the search engine need to be relevant to what the consumer is asking for. Search engines determine the relevance of a website to a particular topic by reading it. They routinely read every page on every website they are aware of. As they read they determine what topics are covered and what searchable keywords a person may use to find this page. This is known as indexing. Search engines are not human and therefore lack the intelligence we have to comprehend what we are reading. At best they can look for patterns—things like how often a particular phrase is used or how the phrase appears in context with other phrases, headings or special formatting. They use sophisticated algorithms to then determine the relevance of the page to various topics.

A good website makes it easy for a search engine to understand what it is about. If it can accurately read and understand your site it will have a good understanding of your target market. Carefully choosing the right words is important. Structuring the site to be easily navigable by the search engines also helps. The key is to make life easy for them. Search engine optimization is a two-way street, however. It is possible to optimize a site so much for search engines that it is almost unreadable and unusable to people. Search engine optimization brings people in; human optimization keeps them there. It is important to maintain a balance and not lose sight of the consumer.

A well optimized site will get you listed higher on the search engine results page (SERP).  Sites listed at the top of the first page are more likely to be clicked than sites listed at the bottom of the page or on subsequent pages. 

Search Engine Marketing

If you advertise, they will come. Hmmm... not as catchy, but true. Advertising works. Now more than ever, in this information age people want information brought to them with minimal effort. Typing a few keywords in a search box is as far as they will go to find you. The rest is up to you. If you want them to come to your site you have to bring your site to them. A carefully worded ad placed on a search page that summarizes your site and directly targets a consumer's needs will get their attention. Since the sponsored ads often appear above the natural or organic search results, a good ad will be seen first.

Hosting

Speed and reliability are two important factors to consider when deciding who should host your website. With high speed internet connections becoming more popular, most web users are not willing to wait more than a few seconds for a page to display. If forced to wait more than two or three seconds for each page to load many users will leave your site. You want your website to be snappy. One or maybe two seconds to load a page is acceptable. Those still on dialup are a little more forgiving. But even they want to see something happening right away. They don't want to wait a few seconds for the page to start displaying.

As for reliability, your website should be reasonably reliable, meaning it should always be available with very few exceptions. Not only for your customers, but for search engines as well. If a search engine visits your site and finds that it is not available it may decide to drop your listing.

No hosting service is perfect. There will always be down time. And during peak times there may be some slowness. As speed and reliability increase, so will price, and at a much faster rate. Going from 99.9% reliable to 99.99% could mean thousands of dollars. After determining how much you're willing to spend, pick a company that can provide acceptable speed and reliability. One that also provides 24/7 support.

Measuring the return

It's important to know the return on your investments; both the website and the advertising. If your website sells products or services you can easily weigh the cost of building and advertising the website against the profits from those sales. If on the other hand your website is intended solely as a corporate presence website that instructs potential customers to contact you, measuring the return is a little harder. The difficulty is in determining whether your new customers found you through your website (and online marketing campaigns) or through other means. That can be difficult, but not impossible. One common technique is to offer a discount or free item to those who mention the website. However you do this, it is important to measure the value of your online marketing efforts.

Going one step further, it is equally important to be able to measure the effectiveness of each of your advertisements. If you're selling products online you can tie each sale to the advertisement that was clicked and the keyword or phrase the consumer typed. This will tell you exactly how much profit each ad is earning. Armed with this information you can continually adjust your marketing campaign to improve sales. For a site that does not sell products directly, you can still monitor consumers' selection of ads and keyword usage to determine popularity and improve your campaign. There are tools that will help you measure your ad effectiveness. Most of what you need is provided with the search engine account. Other tools can summarize your web traffic and perform demographic analysis. The more information you have about the people visiting your site, the better you can serve them and convert them to customers.

A lot of work

So there you have it; the whole picture. Start by building a website. Employ search engine optimization techniques. Deploy it to a reliable hosting provider. Add search engine marketing. Measure the results and adjust the marketing as needed. All of this may seem like a lot to know and a lot of work. Well, it is, but the results make it worth the effort. Of course you could do it all yourself, but then who would run your business? At threeSixteen we want your business to be successful. And we know the success of your business depends on you being there. That's why we provide turn-key solutions that bring you online quickly and completely. Don't just settle for a website. Get the whole picture from threeSixteen.