Online Marketing and Website optimization. Corporate Communication in practice.

Online Marketing and website optimization seem to be the future of communication. Therefore finding the answers of the following marketing questions is essential: When setting up a website how do we do it? How do we communicate with consumers? How do we make sure that our website reflects who we are? How can we be found by consumers? What about SEO?

Setting up a website as a communication tool

We are used to think that setting up a website is a programmer’s job. They know how to do it and we trust them. However, a website is not simply a bundle of code made to look good. A website is a business’ face towards millions of consumers online. As such it needs to comply with business strategy reflecting image, vision and mission. Even more importantly, it needs to represent the business in a way communicating branch, niche, products, services and all subthemes relevant to consumer searches on the web.

There is no doubt that a website needs to be set up by a programmer. To ensure high quality though a close collaboration between the programming team and the company’s marketing or communication department is necessary. Naming, tagging, titles, highlights, products, etc. need to be done in a way facilitating both the company’s best interest and consumer searches. This is done by reviewing business strategy and pointing out what you want consumers to find about you the easiest. After setting your communication goals for your website you have different options in terms of how you are going to implement your communication strategy. You can do it either through careful coding and content management or through helping search engines understand your content (if your website has already been set up and recoding/content optimization it is not an option). Ideally, you could use both strategies.

What does our website communicate?

Monitoring your website performance in terms of visitors, time spent, visitor behavior, returning visitors, keywords can help you understand the way your website functions and is used by consumers. That is done by your Webmaster using tools as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. Analyzing those parameters can give you an overview of how good a work you have done setting up a website. If for example you only have new visitors you might want to rethink website structure or content. It might be a sign that your consumers do not like either your website or your business. Which is the case, you might more or less determine by evaluating time users spent on your website. A quick look to your website’s top keywords will give you a good opportunity to find out whether you have made coding/content mistakes.

It is also very important to control how your website appears in searches and on which position it appears. As search engines (mostly) try to provide the most relevant and highly rated results to their users a low position in a search result might signal problems with either popularity or keywords settings and website structure. Keep in mind that the quality of the website in terms of speed is also taken into account when showing search results. Last but not least, be aware that a lot of the content which is not in plain text form might lower your website’s relevance evaluation as it is often skipped by search engines. Therefore you need to provide your key information in a text form.

Consumer searches and SEO

We are made to believe that SEO is the key to success online. However, Google warns that the SEO business has become a bit shadowy and thus not always a good idea. If you though decide that you want someone specializing in the field to optimize your website, you might need to take a look at Google’s warnings and guidelines. The truth is that in most cases you do not need a SEO specialist. What you need is to keep track of your website’s data and optimize content and structure in such a way that you make it easy for both search engines and consumers find what they need.

Still one of the best ways to make consumers aware of you is advertising and marketing yourself both online and offline. In addition to advertising you have the option of establishing links towards your website from different relevant web places. Some of those links you would need to pay for but others like the links on your Facebook or Google + pages will be free.

 

Basically, one of the most prominent rules in Business is to create something of value. Only after you are sure that your product is sellable it makes sense to start marketing it. Therefore think of your business and the process of communicating it as a process of discovery. You have discovered something which you want to share with others. Who are the others and how you get their interest should be what should guide you, not SEO concerns.

A small tip: when starting a business you often lack resources. But you already have a large public thanks to Social media. Use it. Use your friends as your marketers. Asking them to like your Facebook page or share it (once, do not abuse your friends) will instantly give you access to a larger target group than you have imagined.