What can be accomplished through business website?
Many corporate marketing professionals and business owners downplay the role of business web site. Their excuses can be from “We are not selling anything through website" to “We get customers through reference." Their statement is true, but not accurate in valuing business web site. To weigh the effect of web site more objectively, we need to look at benefits a web site can bring to a business. Listed below are six benefits of business web site.
Customer Support
A well-written web site provides business information to customers. Information may be such as business hours, locations, services and answers to frequent questions.
If business information is effectively communicated to customers through your web site, customer inquiries decrease. Corporate web site also allows customers to search solution from knowledge database.
Branding
You hear about those big names in the web such as Amazon, eBay, and Google. They succeed in building a brand as a web company. But, you don’t have to run a web business to build a brand through a web site. Whatever you put on your main page is what people see what your company is.
Business Promotion
A web site can promote your business by bringing customers up-to-date on your products and services. For example, the web site can promote your product’s technical edge over competitors. New services you offer can be highlighted, and policy and price changes can all be promoted on your web site. This kind of information can be dynamic in nature, which would require frequent updates. It is a low cost maintenance to update through a web site versus making these changes to a brochure or a booklet.
Communication Channel
Web sites can offer a communication channel between your business and customers. If properly collected, customer input becomes a good source of market research for the company product and service.
Direct Sales
More people use web sites for business transactions such as purchase or sales. A proof of it is that most successful web sites such as eBay and Amazon are dedicated to Internet sales. Again, you don’t have to be in web business to make sales on the web. Many corporations make significant sales through web site. In this case, web site can act as a virtual sales counter open for 24 hours to anyone and everyone with access to a computer.
Advertiser
You can use a web site to attract new customers. For this purpose, web sites are decorated with flash images, eye-catching phrases, and popular keywords to optimize search results. Result is measured by the number of visitors on the web site. More web site traffic eventually leads to more sales.
Why should you invest in pay-per-click promotion (PPC)?
The website exists to serve Internet users just as a retail store exists to serve customers.  Because it’s impossible to serve customers who don’t know about your online business, it’s imperative for you to direct network traffic to your home page first. If you ever worked on building site traffic in the past, you would agree generating it is a major task. The following below helps you understand PPC.
How difficult is it to attract visitors from the web?
It depends. It’s not a challenge at all when you have unlimited time and money. However, most likely you are restricted by one thing or the other. For example, you may have an advertising budget, but can’t wait for months to promote new products or services.  Or, you may choose to wait until the site becomes popular, but can’t afford a professional service due to finances. In either case, pay-per-click promotion is an ideal marketing program. You can expect site visitations immediately in the next day and PPC advertising can start with a small budget.
Is pay-per-click program for web sites with minimum traffic?
That is not the case. The proof is that you can find paid advertisements of major portal sites such as Superpage, Yahoo and eBay from the Google advertising campaign ‘Adwords? Even though these sites have built huge web traffic, these companies still have new or seasonal promotional products or services. The need for pay-per-click marketing applies to all web sites where any keyword search ranking is not at the top. The truth is even major web businesses can’t have top search ranking of all keywords promoting their products and services.
How good is pay-per-click program?
It’s as good as your ability to run the program. PPC is a performance-based marketing. You only pay for search volume of the site directed through sponsored keywords campaigns. The real performance depends on how wisely you develop keywords and what you say in search ad to screen out web surfers from motivated customers. That is why experienced Internet professional marketers can run the program economically and efficiently rather than business owners or web masters who aren’t savvy in this area.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The primary benefit of search engine optimization is its cost saving. Because Internet advertising and marketing expenses can run high, any effort to minimize fixed cost will eventually pay off. High search ranking from major search engines is a guaranteed way to bring in site traffic without incurring an expense; so it’s best to run search engine optimization for your marketing needs.
How is this achieved? It takes a good understanding of search engine behavior, thorough planning and development of quality contents, focused topics, and promotion after accurate assessment of the website. You may hear marketing gimmicks promising a quick result to turn your site into a highly rated one in short period. Many of these services depend on unethical or unapproved tactics such as doorway pages, and unreadable page contents. Using them puts the business in risk of having their site dropped from the search index.
Therefore, if you are serious about this, we recommend you to commit six months of optimization effort. The marketing company LoyalStaffs, Inc will take one step at a time to get your site listed to the top page of search ranking. Here is what we say about the process:
- We benchmark your site with keyword search ranking on major engines.
The site is also analyzed for its effectiveness against objectives. Finally, the site content is reviewed and rated for informational quality.
- We develop a plan based on the analysis in the previous step. Some of the action items are straightforward and simple to implement. Others require changes of multiple components that are linked together and thus dependent on each others. For example, improving the site’s structure may impact all of the web pages and its associated links. The more simple improvement is to include effective keywords, because it not only affects visibility of the page, but also shifts the focus of marketing.
- After laying out the plan, the phase is to execute the plan accordingly.
The initial part of the action is to plug in changes to the site’s source file.
After that, the remaining changes need time to build, because it involves the structure and contents of the website. These implementations need coordination between the marketing and web site development team.
During this period, the search ranking needs to be measured on a periodic basis and the optimization program needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Keep in mind that Google’s search robot will visit the site on a monthly basis ?it’s best to check up on things consistently.
Marketing Through Business Directory Websites
There is another way to market products and businesses through the Internet. This type may be called business or product directory marketing. They are generally inexpensive to promote, since major ecommerce websites are willing to post business and product information for data collection.
Let’s look at websites that provide free service for product listing. For instance, Froogle from Google is a typical example of one. While there are rules and regulation on the type of products allowed to advertise, most goods may be listed free of charge. Then there are others that offer listing services for a commission. eBay is an excellent model of this where the merchant is charged only when a transaction between the customer and advertiser takes place. Yahoo has a marketing program for local business listings and the customer pays on a monthly basis. Other ecommerce websites that derive their income via subscriptions are: Verizon’s Super Page and PacBell’s Yellow Page.
Within the Internet lies other business directory websites that specialize in the focused market as well. BeautyStaffs.com is a good example of an online company’s focus on a specific area such as cosmetics, beauty and body care. Most in the industry have a dominant directory website that generated significant traffic. ThomasNet.com is a major contributor in industrial directory listings and Lawyers.com is a preferred website among lawyers, for example. While the volume of traffic generated from directory site is not significant compared to that from search engine, subscription fee of directory service leaves the cost of traffic generation low.
The final example of business directory listing for the Internet is Dun & Bradstreet. Such company offers free business listing, and generates revenues by selling leads and details of credit ratings. Thus, business owners have to make sure their business keywords are properly indexed and their information updated in the D & B. Otherwise, the last thing business owners would want is for their customers to receive a poor credit rating due to sloppiness on their part.
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