Promoting your website online takes time, hard work, and often money, but doing so is vital for the future of your business and the visibility of your brand. Here are five steps that your business should take to promote your website.


1 Find your audience

2 Establish an SEO strategy

3 Find the right domain name

4 Promote your website on social media

5 Provide genuinely useful content


1 Find your audience

Firstly, you need to identify your target audience. Who do you want to sell to? Being more visible online is, of course, a good thing, but this will only translate into sales if you target the right people. Once you know your audience, you need to make sure you can find them, and engage them online. Business2Community have 17 tips to find and engage with your target audience online. Remember, the aim of promoting your website online is not just to make your business more visible online, it is to find and engage with the right audience, and in turn increase conversions.

 

2 Establish an SEO strategy


An effective SEO strategy is vital to the process of promoting your website online. There are many so-called black hat techniques, aggressive strategies that ignore human interaction, and to avoid these and lead the best campaign possible your business should should go to a professional, reputable agency. There are, however, small steps you can also take yourself.


Tools such as Google Keyword Planner can help you find how people are searching for your products and services, and find the right keywords for your business. Focus on the keywords that have low competition and high search frequency. Then write onsite guides and blog posts that are compelling and useful to your audience. Like this one! These will give your website more authority and visibility.


You should, where possible, add these keywords to title tags and the content on your website’s pages. However, be sure to avoid keyword stuffing, as Google penalises sites who sacrifice the readability of their content. You can also engage with offsite SEO by building your own backlinks: You could do this by guest posting on other websites which will then link back to your website with the subsequent keywords, however, the content you provide does need to be high quality, as spammy link building could backfire and harm your website’s visibility.


3 Find the right domain name


Finding the right domain name is an important step in any successful online marketing campaign. Having a unique, catchy name is important to offer internet users an insight into your brand, and a perfect .com domain will help increase visibility and authority online.


Your domain name will also impact your SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign and your presence on social media. Search Engine Journal state that having a keyword domain name can help you achieve higher rankings on Google, but they also argue that more important than a keyword domain name is a brandable domain name.


Your domain name is how users will find, remember, share and identify your company online. To find unique business names, look for a .com extension, and create a memorable, easy to spell, authoritative, and importantly, unique name.


4 Promote your website on social media


If you use social media, you are not alone. Social media has over 2 billion users worldwide and is an increasingly important tool in online branding. The benefits of using social media to promote your site are numerous. Firstly, it’s a cost-effective way to engage with an audience directly. Social media also allows you to target specific audiences and narrow the number of people you are communicating with. These improved customer insights will allow you to encourage interaction with your brand. It can increase both the traffic, recognition of and loyalty to, your business.


However, social media sites differ from one another. You wouldn't cram a 1000-word blog on an issue in your industry into one 140-character tweet. That's why different platforms require different kinds of brand promotion. 

 

How to promote your website on Facebook


In the US, over 40% of businesses use Facebook, and your business, wherever you’re based, shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to engage with people on a local and global level.


Facebook offers advertising packages that can promote your page or website. You can choose whether to pay a set fee for your advertisement to display a certain number of times or a click-per-view fee.


You can use your page to directly communicate with your followers and offer promotions that link straight to your website. To be easily recognisable to your audience, your Facebook page name should be the same as your business name.

 

How to promote your website on Twitter


There are a number of tips to make sure your Twitter page is worth following and engaging with. Short, provocative tweets are better as tweets under 100 characters have a 21% higher interaction rate.


Use social media sites like Twitter to share your onsite content, perhaps with an interesting quotation, that will provide useful information to readers. Make sure all tweets are well-written and grammatically correct. Unless you're President Trump. Sad!


You should also include hashtags that help establish the theme of your post and can help lead the right users to your post. For example, it would be appropriate to share the article you are reading right now with the hashtags #WebsitePromotion, #Promotion, #WebMaster, or #ReallyBrilliantArticleByAGreatCompany.


Lastly, it is important to engage with other users. This may involve retweeting other tweets, especially those that positively mention your brand. Likewise, @ other users who you want to open conversation with.

 

How to promote your website on Instagram


Businesses shouldn’t forget about Instagram, especially as, with over 300 million monthly users, the image-focused social media site has more visitors than Twitter. Also, Instagram is a site where users don’t mind engaging with brands in a more open and direct way than some other social media sites.


A 2015 study on Instagram found that 70% of users reported having already looked up a brand on the platform and 62% of users follow a brand just because they like it. However, just because Instagram tends to involve far less written content, that doesn’t mean the content you post is any less important. Many businesses make the mistake of running their page like their personal account and not a representation of their business and brand. Stay on brand, and remember that posts should be representative of what you do, or of your corporate culture and be aimed to engage with your target audience, which you established during step one.

 

As well as providing genuinely insightful images, you can take simple steps to promote your website on Instagram. Put a link to your website in your bio as this may well increase traffic to the site. Promotions could also work on Instagram, but you should avoid hard selling and instead provide unique, useful content.

5 Provide genuinely useful content


A key part of promoting your website (and therefore your business) is to provide genuinely useful content. Whether this is part of your SEO campaign or on social media, your content is your business's representation in the digital space, so promoting bad content will reflect badly on your, and could potentially sour customers opinion on your brand.


Providing useful and interesting information will help position you as an authoritative voice in your field. Whether you have an insight into your industry, can offer commentary on current trends and events, or have collected your own information or data, putting this into an easily-consumed package is bound to help promote your website.


Content marketing can take several forms, whether that's creating infographics, guest blogging or producing corporate videos, and this can depend on your business and your business strategy. Your strategy could focus on just one of these, or you could create a mixture of all of them. Whatever you do, make sure everything you produce is as exceptional as the service you will offer your customers.


Promoting your website online can be a complex and costly process, and time-poor businesses may find it beneficial to use an external content marketing agency. However, taking these 5 steps will help your website and your brand become more visible online. Remember, promoting your website will not result in overnight success and should be treated as an ongoing part of your digital strategy, rather than a quick fix.

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