Each company that wants to succeed today must have a web presence. AND, your web presence is a lot more than your website. The components of your web presence are:
- Your Website
- Your Blog
- Your Social Media Sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Your Online Advertising & Promotional Campaign
- Your Traffic Generation Methods (Paid & “Free”)
- Your Company Newsletter
All of these components, taken together, form your web presence. They all work together to support each other. The ultimate goal of your web presence is to generate leads for your business. Your web presence IS your lead generation funnel.
The key to effective internet marketing of your local business is to connect to your preferred audience, or preferred customer. For example, if you are in the legal business, you probably don’t need to connect with an internet user in Sri Lanka that’s looking for someone to help with a divorce proceeding. You will more than likely want to connect with someone within 50 to 100 miles. So, you would target your audience geographically and based on specific keywords. Likewise, if you’re in the Air Conditioning repair business in Alabama, you don’t need to connect with people in Maine. Again, geography and keywords are important.
Your whole web presence should be built around your major keywords. This keyword identification is the first step in any web presence and online marketing campaign. After identification of your major keywords, then you can identify what you want your website name to be, the subject of the site's content, your article subjects for your blog, your topics for your social media posts, and your online advertising keywords. Your selected keywords are woven throughout all of your web presence components.
Using these keywords throughout all of your traffic and lead generation methods makes your site more “relevant” to the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) which in turn sends you more traffic. The relevancy of your sites and their “ranking” also helps you with costs for the paid online advertising. The search engines are looking to provide their clients (those people searching for information) what they are looking for. And, if your site is relevant, then you will be given a higher ranking.
Relevancy is determined by how close a match your content, advertising, and keywords are to what the searcher is looking for. SO, this all has to be coordinated.
Remember, you only need to have a web presence IF you want to succeed. If you don’t care about business success, then don’t worry about any of this. You can now go back to your Farmville site on Facebook. But, IF you want to succeed, come back and visit us for future articles in this series.