Reaching Customers Online
Who is your audience? What do I have to provide them? How do I reach them? What are they looking for?
Lots of questions!
Make a fictitious customer/visitor.
- What does your ideal person like?
sports / self-help / family resources / health & wellness/ eye-candy - What is he looking for?
sports info or links / programs for relaxation / help with family / art / auto repair - Talk to the person you want to attract.
- What kind of presentation will grab their attention?
- Millennials are looking for experience. They are not into reading much. They want to know how they can experience the product or service. Videos are very lucrative.
- 40 and up are generally looking for honest communication.
Bulleted items work the best. They tend to scan pages
- Social Media – what are they using?
- Millennials are on YouTube, FB, Instagram, and some Twitter
- 40 and up are mainly on FB, YouTube, and Twitter
- You can link Instagram to FB so when you post to Instagram it will post to FB as well.
- Stay active on Social Media. You will be ignored if you don’t post engaging info 2 times a month at the very least.
- Always link back to your website.
- Coordinate your social media colors and style with your website.
- Use FB groups for events, especially charitable ones.
Website Essentials
- Most important: be mobile friendly
- Next: be secure, Google penalizes sites if they don’t have an ssl certificate (https)
- Make the home page load quickly and grab your person’s attention. Provide the answers to his search.
- Have images of products or services. Images of people are more engaging. Need images? CanStockPhoto.com is reasonably priced, buy the larger dpi if you want to print them. Taking images off other sites without their permission is copyright infringement.
- Do some research on how to make a good video or find someone that can. If your company has videos, ask for permission to use them.
- YouTube and Rumble – use them. They are increasingly popular and showing up in search results. Make sure your description and keywords are closely relevant to your subject. No more than three keywords or phrases per page.
- Google Business Listing – upload images weekly, especially if you have products or trending services. Ask customers for reviews on your Business listing.
- Update your home page weekly if possible.
- Add events and publish across social media.
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a very in-depth subject. Below are some highlights.
Key Phrases
Analyze the content you want on each page and determine at most three key phrases to use for that content. A key phrase is what people would look for to find your page. For example: “life insurance agent Montrose Colorado” It is best to higher someone to do your Keyword research.
It is important to have your best keyword or key phrase as your domain name.
For the most important key phrase it must appear in the following areas on your page:
- Title
- Description
- H1 tag
- First paragraph
- Last paragraph
- Alt tag on images
The search engines look for quality results. The more your page is relevant to the search the better chance it will be ranked on the first page of search results.
Back Links
Back links are links from other websites to yours. Always link back to your site from social media, advertising, reviews on forums, supplier’s websites, the chamber, search platforms like Yelp! The more links back to your site better you will be ranked.
Blog
Blogs are good if you have a steady stream of information and have the time to answer questions and engage in people on your site.
Longevity of Domain
The older your domain name the better. Changing an established domain name will cost you in traffic for a while but Google has Webmaster tools now that lessen the hit.
An online resource for SEO information: