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Expecting to have lots of visitors to your new website is a bit like building a business in the desert and complaining about low sales (Las Vegas excepted). Without implementing a solid marketing strategy, you probably won't see much traffic to your website.
Getting your site indexed by Google and other search engines can take a few weeks. Once you're listed, you likely won't appear on the first page. Example: Let's say you're a mediator and you've just launched your website. Given the number of other websites for other mediation practices, you're unlikely to beat out listings by websites that have been around longer than yours. You may show up on page 10, or 100.
One of the keys to increasing your visibility on Google is to have well-written content on your website that targets a specific market and location. A search for "mediator in L.A." probably won't bring up your site, but if you've included well-written information about your specific field of practice, say "workplace mediation" and location "Venice Beach," your website is likely to come up when visitors enter subject- and location-specific queries, like "workplace mediator in Venice Beach."
Google looks at how many other sites are linking to your website to gauge the popularity of your website. Popularity, along with the quality of your content, are the deciding factors in determining your website's ranking. Getting other sites and services to link to your website requires some legwork, but it's an important task. Going with the mediation example, perhaps you can write a few articles for various online mediation journals, or be an active participate in online forums (with links to your website). Both would increase the number of links on other sites to your own and help boost your popularity.
The ability to collect, create and send personalized emails is essential in bringing back past visitors and enticing new ones. This means offering visitors an e-mail newsletter, coupon codes, articles or some other emailed content that fits your target audience's interests. You'll want to automate subscribing and unsubscribing with a form on your website, automate message creation and sending through a web-based mailing list manager, be compliant with the CAN-SPAM law, and follow up all mailings with detailed statistics that show you what visitors are interested in. Promotional tie-ins, tell-a-friend features and worthwhile content are all essentials in making a mailing list serve as a powerful marketing tool for your website.
Just as affordable as sending bulk emails, online advertising, especially on search engines like Google, should be used by nearly every website. And because you only pay for clicks to your website, e.g. actual visits, you're getting value for every penny spent. We've helped many clients write meaningful ads and establish ad budgets that yield results.
We're skeptics of many firms that provide website optimization with the promise of increased hits to your website. More often than not, these companies will add reciprocal links and content that are written solely to manipulate Google. Yes, you'll probably see a short-term increase in visits, but more often than not Google discovers these practices and can, in some cases, reduce your website ranking or ban a site from their index. It's not easy increasing visits to a website, and any company whose promises don't include adding well-written content, creating a SPAM-law compliant mailing list, or writing meaningful online advertising probably isn't going to provide an increase in visitors that will be sustaining and worthwhile. Because it's the quality of the visits to your website that matter most, not the quantity. If you're website has the kind of easy-to-read statistics that we provide, you'll be able to tell if you're website is reaching your target audience (the kind who spend ten minutes on your site and read a few pages), or just attracting flies who leave after a few seconds.
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