Selling Through Cyberspace

You’ve taken the leap and set up shop on the internet. But as with your bricks and mortar shop, customers won’t come if they don’t know it’s there. Helen Bradley checks out the constantly evolving methods of marketing your website and extracting valuable customer information in the process.

Taking your business online opens your door to a global market, but the website can’t bring customers through the door of its own volition. The reality is that a website needs care and attention like any other aspect of your business and buyers won’t find you unless you do something to ensure that you can be found.

While the marketing technologies you use on the web are different to those you use in a bricks and mortar store, you’re looking for similar results. You want to get people in the door and you need to get them to do what you want them to do once you get them there.

There are lots of ways to market your website and probably the one that gets the most press is to achieve a high ranking in search engine results. The tool for doing this is SEO, or search engine optimisation, and it involves tailoring your website to be attractive to search engines so that your site is ranked high on the list of sites when a web user searches keywords relevant to your business.

The problem is, the more businesses that use the same keywords as your site, the harder it is to be consistently ranked high in search engine results. While being able to be found by a web user seeking your product or services is important, it’s not the only tool you can use to market your site.

A genre of internet marketing which has grown in the last year is pay-per-click  advertising on search properties like Google. Charles Ryder, manager of White Chalk Road Internet Marketing explains: “The reason for this is that, in Australia, the market share of players such as Google is very much higher than it is in the United States. While Google doesn’t have quite 50 percent of the share in the US, it has at least 75 percent market share in Australia. If you’re going to place an advertisement that you want people to click on, the most logical place therefore to put it is on Google or Yahoo.”

Google Adwords is Google’s brand of pay-per-click advertising. Users of this service design small clickable ads that appear on the Google site when certain selected search words are typed by a visitor. A business bids for the keywords to use and each keyword has a value associated with it, depending on its popularity. The business pays each time a visitor clicks on the ad to visit the site. One benefit to a business of Google Adwords is that the entire system, or indeed different ads, can be turned on and off within a few minutes and you can have different ads for different keyword combinations up to hundreds of ads if desired. You can also set a budget per day expenditure so you know in advance exactly how much you’ll be up for—your ads stop being displayed when the money runs out. It’s a flexible and powerful way of advertising a site.

Another option Ryder recommends for steering people to your website and for increasing its ranking in search engines is to publish articles on article portals. These not only bring visitors back to your site via links in the articles but also enhance link popularity which is important to search engine rankings for search engines such as Google. He also recommends that some articles are hosted on your site because of how Google values site content. If your site is static it won’t do as well in that search engine’s rankings as it would do if you add fresh content to the site on a regular basis.

The owners of You’ve Been Gifted (youvebeengifted.com.au) focus not only on attracting new customers but also work to entice their existing customers back to buy. Heather Stone, one of the three founding owners, says the business uses the backoffice tool of their web management company, SiteSuite, to manage the site’s monthly newsletter. “We get a huge response to that; as soon as it goes out you can see the clicks we get,” she says. However, they also sought professional help to overhaul the site to maximise visitors looking for online gift companies to their site. As Stone explains, “We needed to make sure our website could be found by people looking for gift baskets or corporate gifts and that it would be ranked number one in all the areas that mattered to us. Even though 90 percent of our market is corporate, most PAs and company executives go to the web looking for their gifts.”

As part of that revamp, Jason West, managing director of Websalad.com.au reworked the text for the site and added a blog. “It’s an easy way for a company to interact with clients and to continually provide updated information to them,” he explains of the two-fold value of a blog. “From an optimisation point of view, having a blog ensures that the site regularly adds new content, and that encourages the spiders to trawl the site more frequently and speeds up indexing of the site which benefits the site’s ranking.”