Here at Gorges Web Sites, we receive many requests for information about web site promotion.  For most people, this seems to boil down to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), or more directly ‘how do I get good ranking on Google’?  If you are really and truly interesting in growing your online business, this blog article is for you.  And as you will see, it is about much more than just SEO.

If you would like to experience the most cost-effective growth possible for your site and your business, there are 5 areas to focus on, and SEO is NOT the first:

1. Analytics: We can’t judge the effectiveness of any marketing effort, or evaluate growth without metrics.  We highly, highly recommend Google Analytics.  It is free, and easy to install on your site.  Get it on your site before taking any more steps.  You will be amazed at the wealth of data the Google sends your way.  This simple tool will tell you what pages on your site have the highest attention, where your viewers come from, which keywords are delivering traffic, the effectiveness of your paid advertising, and much more.  Get your analytics going BEFORE you undertake any additional steps.  Do it today.
2. Social Marketing: Building your online business requires much more than optimizing content.  It is crucial that you engage and learn from your early customers.  Foster community, push your site, generate referrals, blog about your ideas everywhere, write content, post fliers at the coffee shop.  Use facebook, twitter, put a blog on your website, encourage your visitors to add content to your site via topical discussions.  Draw your audience into ongoing discussions on your web site.  Think outside the box, drive traffic.  Start now and keep it simple and low-cost.  You are the driving passion behind your idea and your web site, let the world hear your voice.
3. Public Relations: This step is about your relationship with your broader community.  You need to lean on traditional PR to strengthen your brand and expertise.  Build a positive opinion about your company to your neighbors, partners, employees, the public, and potential investors.  Generate press releases, develop positive relationships with the media, and build your brand in the public’s mind.
4. SEO: What you are reading this article to find out about is likely Search Engine Optimization.  A properly constructed web site takes SEO into consideration during the design and information architecture steps.  SEO should not be an ‘afterthought’ that you outsource to some agency.  SEO is the lifeblood of your site and needs to be planned in.  If your site is not architected well, you can ‘optimize’ keywords all day long without effect.  Traditional SEO has 2 components: 1) Your site content, structure, links, keywords, menus, etc, and 2) In-links from 3rd party sites.  If you have done #2 and #3 above, you are already building in-links (continue!).  If you have proper data analysis and analytics running on your site (from #1 above), you will have up-to-date metrics on how well your site is doing.  OK, so you’ve done all of the above, built the site correctly, have analytics installed, and are generating traffic through your own efforts, it is time to analyze and optimize your site.  In an SEO analysis, we look at menu structure, content structure, keywords, title tags, meta tags, your site map (you do have a site map don’t you?), and more.  Taking as input your desired list of keywords and key-phrases, we will tune one or more content pages to maximize exposure to the words that make most sense for your business.  When done, we will watch your analytics and encourage steps 2 and 3 above as ongoing traffic-building efforts.
5. Paid Search: Now, with all of this in place, a paid search or adwords campaign can be constructed and tuned.  Start small, have a short list of keywords and reasonable budget.  This is not about branding, this is about driving traffic.  Determine your target cost per acquisition of new customers, and evaluate if your paid search is delivering.  Drop key phrase campaigns that aren’t delivering; turn the budget up on campaigns that are delivering.

Summary: The order above is crucially important.  Don’t spend a penny on paid search or paid advertising until you can track performance, have developed brand awareness, and are engaging your community about your business and areas of expertise.  Get this together and watch your business grow exponentially.