There are a huge array of marketing techniques and avenues that you can choose to do when trying to boost your business. Some are online and others are offline and depending on what you are trying to achieve you may try either one or both of these techniques. If you have a website then you may throw a huge chunk of your marketing towards it.

On page optimisation is essentially making changes on a page within your site or by adding new content to your site. It may be that you add a blog or that you optimisation the content on a page in include more keywords or build up internal links. Off page optimisation is marketing that you do offsite away from your website. The aim of this is to improve the traffic to your site and your rankings on the search engines. This can be achieved in a number of ways. Often people build up external links to their site from high quality authority domains, comments on other sites, have social media pages and interact with others or upload videos to sites such as YouTube. All of this can help build up your website without affecting the content on your site.

Ideally you want to do both to give your site the best chance of improving and gaining additional traffic.

When it comes to websites, we all want our site to shoot to the top of the search engines and get a load of traffic to the site as soon as possible. If you opt to use Google Adwords then you can do this but it is often very costly. Alternatively, you may want to do some SEO on your site.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, it is a way of optimising your site so that it ranks higher on the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Many companies are now realising the importance of SEO and are turning to marketing companies to assist them with this.

It is important to remember that SEO is not a quick fix and it can take a period of time before you start to see any effect from it. Any changes that are made to a website, can take weeks to start to take affect and even months to see the full effect. You cannot simply have one month of SEO and expect to see your site suddenly soar up the search engine results pages.  It is also important to remember that it needs to be on going. If you stop doing SEO on your site then you can expect any positive affects you have had from it to start to diminish over time.

Ideally you should trial SEO for a minimum of 6 months but ideally 12 months to start to see the benefit.

Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that online marketing is something that they need to do in one go a few times a year. They will often spend time and money on online marketing – start to see results and then wonder why they start to drop back down the search engines or lose traffic when they stop.
Online marketing offers a wide array of ways to market your business to people through the internet. It can be done through your website, social media sites or through email marketing for example.
It can be tricky to know which forms of online marketing you should invest in, especially if your budget is tight. Some forms of marketing are fairly expensive but offer quick instant results such as Pay per Click. Others will take months and months to build up but will cost less in the long run and should give you firm foundations to continue to build upon.
You need to allow 6 months or so to see if your online marketing in terms of link building and SEO is having a positive effect. Be aware that if you stop doing it you may find that all the hard work you have done to achieve the current positions you have starts to unravel.

A website can be created to do many things such as to give more information about your company or as an online shop. Some sites are there purely for information and to inform visitors of the products or services your business sells, whilst others allow visitors to purchase off the website or login in to carry out certain tasks.

Even if you are only trying to gain enquiries through email, contact forms or telephone, every website needs to have call to action placements. The purpose of a Call to Action or CTA’s is to get the visitor to complete an action based on your recommendations. Some call to actions are simply a “click here” button that takes the viewer through to an enquiry form, whereas others will be stronger and require the customer to complete a purchase.

How a CTA is displayed can differ vastly from site to site and even from page to page with some being created to look like an advert you may see in a magazine to others simply showing a phone number to call or a live chat button to click on. It is important to give your visitors direction on your site so they find it easy to do what they came to and CTA’s are a great way of doing so.

When it comes to online marketing and in particular search engine marketing it is all about the keywords and phrases that you are focussing on. You need to think about what someone may type in to a search engine to find your business. You would expect to come top for your own company name but if they had never heard of your company but were looking for a product or service that you sell, think about what they may search for. Once you have a list of these types of phrases you can then check where you currently rank for them. If you are down the bottom of the first page or a few pages in to the search results the chances are you will be receiving very few visits for that term. If you believe that term is an important one then you need to try and work on improving your placement to get in to the top 1-5 places. The higher up you are the more clicks you will get but also the harded the competition becomes. Make sure that you have the keywords on the relevant pages of your website and that you have enough unique, relevant content on your site that the search engines will recognise that you are able to offer the viewer what they are searching for.