A Guide To Marketing Your Website Well
So you’ve got a killer website for your business, but you don’t know how to spread the good word?
Never fear, Midphase is here! Read on to learn about three digital marketing basics to get your website out into the great virtual wide open:
PPC
PPC stands for pay per click. This is a type of advertising where an advertiser pays a fee every time their online ad is clicked. For most intents and purposes, PPC these days has become almost synonymous with search engine advertising. On most search engines, the PPC advertisers will be the very first results to appear from a search, and although they are usually highlighted or have the word “Ad” next to them, they will be the first result a potential customer sees.
How does it work? We’ll focus on search engine PPC since that’s what you’re most likely to be dealing with. First, you as the advertiser will choose a set of keywords that you want to buy. These should be the most relevant words/phrases to your company. For example, if you sell lotions and creams, then “skincare products” would be a great keyword to purchase. You then contact the search engine with which you want to advertise and buy the keywords.
Here’s what PPC boils down to: advertisers are buying search engine real estate with keywords as the address.
For a more in-depth look at PPC, click here.
SEO
SEO stands for search engine optimization. OK…so what does that mean?! That means when a potential customer is searching for something you’re offering, you get your website as close to the top of a search results page as possible.
SEO can get very complex – some people specialize in this stuff – so we won’t go too far into it. To summarize, search engines use a range of factors to figure out how good your website is and how much a searcher will want to see it – the relevance of your website to a given search. To have a look at the factors that determine your site’s SEO, and have a troll around a website that’s devoted entirely to this, take a look here.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing’s basic principle is pretty straightforward: you use social media platforms (like Twitter and Facebook) to market your company, products, etc. The way in which you do so, however, is not so straightforward. Many companies out there use these platforms to increase brand awareness and to give a platform for the brand voice. Others use targeted social media ad campaigns, special social media offers, public interest stories, and much more.
A large part of what determines how you use social media marketing is the type of business you have. If you’re a current and modern brand, social media will be one of your main consumer outreach platforms, and will be a great way for you to get more business. If you are a somewhat more established or traditional brand, you may not need to focus as much energy on your social media. Know your brand, then know how to use social media to amp it up.
And with that, you now a thing or two (well, three actually) about how to put that website of yours to work, maximizing its online marketing potential and driving your business forward. Here’s to marketing your website – and beyond!