Dig into your data

Big or small, businesses that sell products online must enable in-depth analytics and web tracking. This data will help business owners and managers visualize their sales funnel and know, without a doubt, what is and is not working. Every active Internet business needs to back up their sales tactics with equally in-depth marketing tactics. By enabling a full online marketing suite for your website, you’ll be able to drive more traffic into your sales funnel and keep your sales leads from going cold.

Is your website optimized for search engines?

Understanding the implementation and fundamentals of SEO does not require you to become an SEO expert. One of the basic steps of helping your website rank higher in search engine results is to make sure you’re using unique keywords that target your audience and what your audience might be looking for online. Once you’re dedicated to a unique, long-tail keyword for each page of your site, you’ll want to make sure you optimize these areas of your site in a way that is natural to your target marketing search terms.

These areas include: URLs, Title tags, Heading tags (H1, H2, etc.), Alt image tags, Meta title and description, and Webpage content

Some additional SEO best practices include: Maintaining an active blog with regular new blog posts, focusing on long-form (1000+ words) content that informs on a topic that is related to your keyword focus for that page or blog post, and creating more posts and web pages that stand on their own as a complete resource on a specific topic that your target audience is likely to search for.

The higher quality your content, the more likely others are to share your links or add their links to their own blog posts and websites. These links count as important inbound links that are great for your SEO and help drive higher quality referral traffic back to your website.

Get talking on social media.

Social media is one of the most important ways you can reach and connect with your target market and drive traffic to the new content you are working to create regularly. Sharing interesting content on social media platforms like Facebook, Google+, or Twitter helps increase your brand recognition. In turn, this increases your online presence and authority – two areas that are important aspects of customer experience today.

By interacting on social media you build trust in your brand. Your direct engagement creates a two-way street for open communication that gives your brand human-like personalities. The more you can engage with your followers, the less risk your followers feel when deciding whether or not to buy a product from you.

Without social media, you are limiting your traffic to people that are already familiar with your brand or old-fashioned word-of-mouth tactics. While those aspects of marketing still work, it is important to realize not only how social media can help your current marketing campaigns become more robust, but to know that any print, radio, television, or referral tactics you have used in the past lead to search!

As people try to find your business or similar businesses online, optimizing your website and being available on social media help you capture those searching audiences. After all, many popular social media websites are considered search engines too.