Visibility is key online

Consider: how many times have you gone to a search engine and moved past the first page? 1 out of ten times? One out of 50 times? This should give you an idea of how competitive rankings can be. If your website does not place within the first page of critical keywords, you’re losing traffic, probably half of all traffic to your website.

What’s more, being ranked is not the only key to visibility. Social media marketing plays a strong role in “Being everywhere your customer is.” And paid search can improve visibility in certain niche areas which are hard to break into.

What it entails

Getting noticed is the first in 7 steps to website success. If you can’t be found online, you cannot drive traffic to your website through search engines and social media sites.

If you can't be found, you can be clicked on.

An example would be like a brick-and-mortar business that has no sign out front telling the world what you do; you might have great product or services inside, but if no one knows you’re there, you’re not going to get customers. To take the metaphor further, even if people know you exist (by some miracle) and try to find you, if you’re not on search engines or easily found on social media sites, customer trust plummets.

How the landscape is evolving.

Although search engine marketing was the primary method of driving traffic in the past, that’s changing with social media marketing and paid search.

Modern companies will use a mix of all three, in the right combination, to make sure that all channels of their target demographic will see their product or service.

Primary Tactics

• Copywriting & Creative: How you say it is important. It’s not only what you say, but how you say it. Some copy just ‘pops out’ at people, gets you noticed.
• SEO (Organic Search): Optimize web pages. Not all websites are equal in terms of ’spidering’, a phrase describing search engines crawling your site for phrases (and thereby ranking content). If you ‘condition’ your pages correctly with the right phrases (keywords), not only will you have better rankings in search engines, but you also will drive higher quality traffic.
• Paid Search: Get placed in niche markets. Paid search can reach specific niche markets (by triggering for specific niche keywords) and track the success by keyword or campaign. Also, paid search can be filtered to trigger only for specific geographic locations at low cost.
• RSS: Broadcast your marketing message. Through ‘real simply syndication you can ‘be everywhere your customer is’, like social sites and authority sites. Plus, RSS allows customers to ’subscribe’ to you, thereby being alerted to new content when available directly.
• Email Marketing:  Don’t let your target forget about you. If potential customers ‘opt-in’ for your newsletter, you will continually remind them that you exist, and have something they want. Consistent (rather than insistent) email marketing will deliver the right message, regulary, and that means visibility.

Secondary Tactics employed

• Content Building: More quality pages, more rankings. Focusing too closely on a small set of keywords will not bring in all the traffic that might buy. If your website has rich, quality content, there are many places you will pop up online. Also, the more content you have, the more you will be linked to, and that means traffic.
• Affiliate Marketing: Piggyback onto existing marketing channels. Highly contested, always controversial, affiliate marketing can be expensive if you don’t know what your doing. Using the power of existing developed markets by affiliate companies, you ride their media channel wave, reaching the your target customers wherever they go – online, or offline.
• Keyword Analysis: Discover how your customer defines you. Discovering the right keywords to use is an art and science unto itself. By researching and finding the keywords that people actually search for to find your product or service, you are defining your target market. Used primarily in SEO, you will drive the right traffic to your website, more often. This often spills over into copywriting for higher impact messages as well.
• Competitor Analysis: What do your competitors do? Learn from your competitors on how they get rankings. You can analyze both text that is visible, and metadata behind the scenes (right-click on any web page, select ‘view source’, and examine the content between the <head> and </head> tags.)

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