Internet marketing for online businesses has become a “must have” rather than a “nice to have” as everyone knows. But for many online businesses, their website is simply a “showcase” of products and organizations that no one could find online without first knowing the URL. There has to be more to internet marketing for online businesses than simply setting up a position and hoping that people will stumble upon it.
The first step is to really focus on who your target customer is. What is your age, gender, likes and dislikes, etc. The second step is to brainstorm the keywords this person would likely type in their search bar to find products and services like yours.
Keyword research is internet marketing’s treasure chest for online businesses, and it takes all the time it takes to get it right.
One of the best tools to use in keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool, which you can search on “Google.” It gives you all kinds of good keyword data and it costs nothing.
Wordtracker is a powerful tool and comes in a free and paid version. A small investment in optimizing your site for “buyer” keywords will pay off.
You should also look at Good Keywords, Digital Point, and Spyfu.
Lastly, do some Google searches on keywords that you think your customers would use. See which sites appear on the first page. Then go to those sites, click ‘view’ and ‘page source’ on your toolbar and you will see what keywords those sites are optimized for. They may be using some that you haven’t thought of!
What you need to do then is create a site structure for your site, where you can write an optimized page around one of your hot keywords. Ideally, you want a three-tier structure where no page is more than two clicks from the home page. This makes visiting your site a more user-friendly experience for your visitors and for search engines.
Internet marketing for online businesses is not just about making it easy for people to find your site. It’s also about making your site easier to use once people arrive. So if people type in a keyword term, the page they land on needs to be optimized around that keyword and give genuine value to the reader on that specific topic.
