The primary objective of every business and personal website is to reach out to as many potential customers as possible, in order to drive conversions and impact sales. While the website url is indeed promoted in all the offline and online marketing communications collateral, it is extremely important that customers searching for the product or service being offered see your url ideally in the first search result page
Optimize your website for showing up foremost in search results
Search engines are the first port of call for customers interested in your product or service, and billions of searches take place every day on practically every query under the sun. But what are search engines really looking for, when their algorithm identifies the url’s that should be thrown up in the search result? Search engine crawlers are looking for informative and accessible content, which matches the search query on various parameters, the biggest one being that the content and easily understandable to the seeker. The content should also be coded in such a way that the search engine can easily gather the information from the website.
Creating and optimizing your social presence
Customers worldwide are spending a large part of their online minutes on social media. Liking, sharing and commenting in content created by individuals and brands is the No.1 activity online. Along with creating your website, you must create a page, channel and profile of your business on leading social media platforms like Facebook, Linked In, Youtube and Twitter. This should be followed by continuously creating quality content like posts, tweets and videos, which are engaging and empower your customer with balanced information about your product or service category and your brand.
Citations from other digital destinations
Search engines give great importance to other people, websites or blogs linking to your website, mentioning your website url, and also sharing the content displayed on your website. These are called web citations, and hold immense value for increasing your website’s visibility.
Create a blog
Successful websites, which are continuously ranking high in search results, regularly maintain a blog section where they upload relevant and original content regularly. This fresh content is preferred by the crawlers of the search engines, as it recognises the content as being fresh and unique. Articles, interviews, videos relating more to the product or service category, rather than the product or service itself, is the best way to keep your website in sight of the search engines. It is the ‘live’ part of your otherwise static website, and the regularly updated content fits in with the ‘latest content’ parameter of the search algorithm. Search engines love websites that offer fresh and relevant, informative content that can satisfy the user’s query in the first click.
Infographics, slideshows and white papers are a great tool
An infographic is an image which contains data that has been creatively disseminated with the use of multi-coloured graphics and easy to read font. You should also create presentations and upload them as slideshows on social platforms like Slideshare and Author Stream. Search engines throw up relevant results across all the social platforms, making it imperative for your brand to be present on them. Whitepapers are content pieces on a particular subject, with extremely detailed information which comes across as the industry standard in the respective product or service category. They are styled in a consistent manner, incorporating the brand promise and visual identity, and usually uploaded as a PDF.
Videos score high on engagement
Creating short and interesting videos about the product or service, which are educative, informative and entertaining, is a great way of featuring in the video searches conducted by your prospective customers. You should combine the power of compelling social platforms like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and LinkedIn, to name a few, and harness their individual strengths by uploading content which fits in with the profile of each platform, and mentioning your website url in every content piece.