subject: Website Promotion for Small Businesses [print this page] Traditionally, a small to medium size business will have a marketing budget which will cover everything from local paper advertising to an advert in the Yellow Pages. Until more recently, this has been a perfectly suitable method of business promotion.
However, things have changed in the last 5 years and the Internet has emerged as a force to be reckoned with in the world of marketing. After an initial settling in period, more connected and technology aware companies have thrashed it out to get themselves featured prominently in front of potential customers searching for their types of business.
The level of work, client business understanding and careful campaign planning should not be underestimated. Simply picking up the phone to one an advertising agency and saying "Hi, can you promote my website is a good start, but you should also be prepared to sit in for the long haul while search engines learn about your business and start to send qualified visitors your way. br>
Whilst many have enjoyed success in their campaigns and boosted sales from increased traffic to their site, many small businesses have yet to jump on board. Various barriers to entry include budget, search engine knowledge and of coursetime. Effective website promotion takes a great deal of time and effort, which can often be better spent by a company in areas they already understand well.
Please then give a warm welcome tothe Internet Marketing agency.
So, who are they and what do they do? Well, for the most part, they (should) perform three main activities.
1. Analyzing a client's business goals
2. Analyzing the client's competition, both online and offline
3. Use a variety of methods to promote the client's core business branding, visibility and awareness beyond the competition's.
Diligently combined, the above tasks can have a huge impact on small business productivity. Whilst there are a few agencies that do align their own goals with their client's goals, there are a huge number of fly by night Internet Marketers. As with any industry, there is always a group of people who want to make money by doing as little work as possible. Whilst hundreds of years of worldwide commercialism have shown this to be a false dream, many still persist and the Internet is rife with companies providing Search Engine Optimization with little to no regard for ease of access, sustainability and targeted growth in footfall.
What's worse is that a large percentage of these companies (often little more than a one man band) can actually do much more harm than good. By employing methods designed to build huge numbers if inbound links to a client site with no regard for quality or relevance, some can awake the sleeping beast. If a search provider such as Google cottons on that these Black Hat' methods are in use, they will often penalize the site, sometimes even going as far as banning them from search engine results listings. Clearly this could have devastating consequences for any business impacted in this way.
One fine example found was a banner ad claiming to offer 1000 back links to your site for $9.99! You can only imagine the results of that. Automated methods have long since been proven ineffective as proper SEO needs to be done manually and is time consuming generating reciprocal links from good quality websites.
On the flip side to this coin, there are a number of agencies about who do provide quality by working closely with their client and taking their needs as first priority. These agencies worry less about search engine rankings and care more about the actual number of quality traffic a site receives. From there, the approach should be to ease the path of conversion. i.e converting the visitor to a customer.
Website Promotion for Small Businesses
By: indyainfotech
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