The Business Card Shoppe’s services have evolved greatly since we opened for business in 2007. We quickly found that our clients were looking for one place to take care of all of their marketing needs. For the past two years, we have noticed that many of our clients love their website, but just aren’t sure how to market their website.

We’ve found, over the past couple of years, that marketing a website and SEO go hand in hand. We were handing over beautiful websites that were performing fairly well due to the standard SEO we’ve always built into our websites. But, in getting to understand SEO, we’ve realized that there is so much more to marketing a website and simply building in standard SEO than we could have ever imagined.

There may have been a time, many years ago when you would just build a website for hats and a few weeks later, you would Google “hats” and just like magic, there you were on the first page. But, it simply isn’t that simple any more, you know how many hat websites there are? They are all competing for that first page. And they are all spending a good deal of time and money to get there. Standard SEO simply does not cut it as it used to.

So now that you have your website, what can you do to promote it?

1. Post the URL to your website on everything! Business cards, letterhead, envelopes, car magnets, the signature of your email (very important), banners, literally everything that also includes your company logo.

2. Blog, blog, blog – If you don’t have a blog built into your website, build one in! Search engines LOVE content, they will visit your site frequently if they see new content. You might think that no one will read your blog, why would anyone be interested in what you have to say? Well, the fact is, you could be right. I personally think there are very few people that will sit and read my own blogs. But, the search engines love what I have to say. ESPECIALLY if it’s unique!

3. Social Media – You may despise social media, you might even think it’s a joke, but guess what, I can guarantee your competition is using social media. What’s the benefit? I believe that the connections I create with other local business owners benefits my business. You’ll run into those clients that actually find it easier to communicate through Facebook than to pick up the phone and call you. I have answered many, many, many questions through Facebook for my clients. The other benefit is backlinks, it’s rare that I publish a post that doesn’t contain a link to my website. Search engines love backlinks. Get Social!

4. Pay Per Click – Again, the pessimist my say, “That’s ridiculous, I’m not going to pay for someone to visit my site!”. And I’ll say once again, “Your competitor is!”. Even though we have a very strong showing on Google for SEO Services,Small Business Marketing Services, Website Design Services, and Business Card Printing, I still run a consistent Pay Per Click campaign. Why? The answer is simply, Marketshare. I want to take as many spots as I can on that first page of Google. I want to dominate. If you run your campaign correctly, your ROI for Pay Per Click can be great. Make sure you get some advice before diving it, it can become very discouraging if not done correctly. And, VERY IMPORTANT here; Don’t run a Pay Per Click campaign without making sure your website has been optimized for at least a few of the keywords you are using on your Pay Per Click campaign. Otherwise, you just won’t get the marketshare you should be looking for.

5. Track your success – I’ve always utilized various tools on the internet that have helped me track the progress of my website marketing and SEO. A website I use very frequently is Hubshouts Website Grader. This website will give you a great deal of information on how your website is performing and offer many suggestions on how to increase your website’s grade. One quick note, if you are hiring an SEO company, make sure you run their website through this grader. If they aren’t scoring at least 75+, then find another SEO company, trust me! Another great website is Link Popularity.com. This website will tell you how many websites link back to yours. this is very important to search engines. You must have strong, relevant websites linking in to yours. Your nephews website about cool rock bands may not do the trick, unless your website is about cool rock bands of course.

This is just some of what can be done to market your website and to increase your traffic. If you find after a good six months or so that you still aren’t receiving the traffic you want, start looking for a good SEO company that can help. Again, be very cautious when searching for an SEO company. Even though we offer SEO services, I would be more than happy to check out the company you are currently using or intend to use. This may not be what you want to hear, but if you are paying $100 to $200 a month for SEO, STOP! They are not doing what they need to do to build your website’s SEO. SEO is a very, very time consuming process, and any SEO company that is doing their job, is most likely going to push your budget a bit. But in the long run, it could be very well worth it to get you ahead of your competition.

Phil Fisk
Owner
The Business Card Shoppe