Most businesses are aware of who many of their competitors are but did you know that your online competitors can vary drastically. In terms of getting people in to your business in a physical location, your competitors are probably going to be within a 30 mile radius. Most people that go to buy something in person will not want to travel much further than that unless it is an item of quite high value. When you look at online competition you will often find a large number of them that are not located within the same county as you and maybe not even within the same country!

It is important to check this and check that your online prices can compete with those or that if they don’t you can over something above and beyond. If for example it is carpet that you are selling, you may want to make it clear that you are slightly more expensive than some of the online companies but you are able to offer a personalised service and visit the address to take measurements and talk through the carpet samples. This may be enough to persuade someone to use you rather than a company which is essentially just going to dispatch the carpet based on your order.

PPC stands for Pay per Click and is a common and popular form of online marketing. Many people try to experiment with pay per click, but the truth of the matter is that if you do not know what you are doing then you may end up wasting a lot time and a lot of money.

Firstly you need to fully understand what PPC is and how it works. Each company that offers PPC such as Google and Facebook work in different ways, so you will need to have an overview of them all or decide which one you are going to use first.

Keyword research for PPC can be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also incredibly important. Your entire PPC campaign is built around keywords, and the most successful AdWords advertisers continuously grow and refine their PPC keyword list. You will need to do initial keyword research but will also need to do on going research to ensure that you are targeting the correct phrases.

Once you’ve created your new campaigns, you’ll need to manage them regularly to make sure they continue to be effective and that you are getting the best results for your money that you are spending on the campaigns.

Many web marketers and website owners are obsessed with rankings, concentrating all of their efforts on this and worrying when they notice a slight drop in positions. Of course rankings can help to get more traffic to your site, but rankings should only be a part of your web marketing strategy.

There is no point in getting a huge amount of traffic to your site if your site itself is not functioning as it should and is causing people to leave soon after landing on it. If this happens you will struggle to maintain high rankings anyway.

If you notice a dip in your rankings firstly see if it has affected the traffic to your site. It may be that you have dropped for some generic phrases but have increased your positions for the key phrases that people are actually searching with meaning not only may the quantity of the traffic increase but also the quality.

It is one thing to have a website but it is another trying to get up on the search engines above your competitors. Competition depends very much on locations you are targeting and the phrases you wish to rank highly for. The more generic the phrase and the wider the location band in which you wish to target the more competition there will be. This inevitably means that you will need to invest more time and more in to your marketing to try and compete.

Ideally if you only have a small budget, you need to be realistic and initially target keywords and phrases that are less competitive. This will allow you to combat a few phrases and hopefully draw in some business before going for the competitive phrases.

Keyword research is vital before starting marketing as you not only need to know how competitive they are but also the search volume of traffic as there is no point targeting phrases that are easy to win but no one is searching for them.

Designing a website takes skill and experience. You need to know what works and what should be placed where in order to make it attractive to the viewer as well as functioning correctly.

Call to action banners may look similar to adverts and are a way of guiding your customer through the website. They are designed to make the viewer take immediate action such as “call now” or “click here”. A website or advert without a call to action is not complete and will probably not be effective.

Adding a “buy now” call to action is often done on websites, but if you do not offer a sample or free trial this can increase your bounce rate by up to 85%! Even the shape of the call to action button can have an effect on how successful it is. Rounded corners can be more enticing and make a banner more likely to be clicked on that a rectangle one that has sharp edges. There is a lot of psychology behind call to actions and website design as a whole.

Social Media Giants, Facebook’s new Save Button for the web businesses can now copy and paste simple code into their articles and allow those articles to be saved to Facebook for the user to read later. Now users can read all their favorite articles in one place in an environment over 1 billion people are already familiar with: Facebook. To add to that, Facebook launched Instant Articles, allowing publishers all over the web to format their articles for users to read right inside Facebook. Users in essence never have to leave Facebook to read your blog. Get them to like your page, perhaps mark it as “See First” or a favorite or add it to a list, and now when they see your articles in their feed they can click on the articles and click the “Save” button to save it for reading later. We guess it’s rest in peace to the RSS feed!

Google Analytics is a great free statistics package that allows you to see information about the visitors to your website. It can be very useful in finding out if your marketing is working and where is best to invest your time and money. Not only does it show you the number of visitors but it can also show you how they came to your site e.g through Google organic searches, Adwords etc.

You do have to be careful though taking everything at face value as sometimes the data can become skewed. There are many sites that will show as referral visits to your site increasing the traffic to your website (often quite substantially). With further investigation these sites are often not referring real traffic to yours and are actually what’s known as spam referrals. Spam referrals can make your web stats have a sudden unexplained spike in traffic which often comes with an extremely high bounce rate. To be able to find out your accurate statistics you need to be able to remove these spam referrals by creating a custom report.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is effectively optimising your site in such a way to improve its rankings on sites such as Google. Bing and Yahoo. If you have a website and are not aware of SEO then it is certainly something you need to look in to. It may be that your site has been built with little or no SEO meaning it may struggle to get ranked high on the search engines. If you had a site built that was SEO friendly, that may have been great to start with, but over time this will need to be tweaked and new pages optimised to allow your SEO to build.

Getting SEO wrong can actually be worse than not doing it at all as you can find your site penalised and therefore removed from the search engine listings entirely. When doing SEO be sure to use a company or individual that has the relevant experience to carry out the work. You may be able to ask for examples of projects they have worked on to see for yourself if the SEO is working.

There are so many ways to advertise your business online, it can be hard knowing which methods are right for you and your company. What works well for one type of business may not work well for another.

The main point you need to consider is “are you getting a return on your investment?”. There is no point in spending thousands on marketing every month if you are only making a few hundred in sales. This being said, most companies do have to spend more on marketing initially to get the website up on the search engines and to build up their brand awareness so there may be a period when you are spending money on marketing but not seeing a great improvement in sales or enquiries. This is to be expected, but all marketing needs to be tracked in order to ensure that it is currently or soon will be having a positive impact on the business.