In my last post I mentioned that the summer can be a good time to check out what your competitors are up to so that you can work out what you might need to do to improve your online marketing. There are a couple of tools I use to do this which gives me an idea of what competing sites are up to by reviewing where their back links are coming from.

The first tool is Yahoo Site Explorer:  Just type the url of your website (including the http) into the search box at the top of the page and click on ‘Explore URL’. You’ll get two sets of results. Firstly, the number of web pages of your site that are in Yahoo’s index (under ‘Pages’). Next, if you click on ‘inlinks’, you’ll get a list of sites linking to your website that Yahoo has indexed. You can download the list of links by clicking on ‘Export first 1000 results to TSV’ and then save as an excel spreadsheet.

The next step is to put your competing sites’ urls into the search box and check out their back links.

By reviewing which sites are linking to your competitors, you can find out what marketing they’re doing e.g social media – are there links from Twitter? Do they participate on blogs and forums?

If they regularly appear in industry journals they may have a PR agency working for them. They may have random links, which show that they may have submitted to various directories in the past. However, you may find that there are sites in the list that you could also obtain a link from. Use the link list to get ideas and see where you could improve your online marketing or perform better than them.

A word of warning – the Yahoo Site Explorer tool may not be around for much longer as Bing is due to take over Yahoo’s search results quite soon. You can query back links on Bing by using the following:

“yourwebsite.co.uk” -site:yourwebsite.co.uk

(Type your query in exactly as it is in italics)

You should then get a list of sites linking back to yours or your competitors that Bing has indexed.

Don’t bother querying Google with the same query as Bing as Google doesn’t publicly show all links anyway.

A newer tool available is SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer. The guest version only gives you the first 200 back links, but if you register on the site, you can review up to 1000 back links, which is the same number as Yahoo.

It’s well worth carrying out this exercise every few months just to make sure your on top of your online marketing and keeping up with your competitors! What do you do to keep tabs on your competitors? Please share any tips you have!

A few weeks ago Louise and I both participated at a local Business Link event on marketing, called ‘Make Marketing Work’. We were ‘experts’ on our tables which was facilitated by a Business Link representative and were there to help discuss and answer questions on the topic of our table. Louise’s table discussed social media and my table discussed online marketing, but focused more on search engines (although social media did come up quite a lot!).

It was useful to talk to local business owners and find out what their challenges are in promoting their businesses online. The main issues that came out for me were that as professional online marketers, we tend to overestimate how much people know as we use the internet day in day out. Most business owners don’t use the internet as much as us as they’re busy doing what they specialise in.

Many people struggle with the jargon as it’s an industry full of jargon! Some people don’t know the difference between organic search results and paid search results. Many owners are more interested in getting their business found locally rather than nationally, many businesses aren’t doing email marketing and the overwhelming issue was having the time to do everything!

We had people attending from a range of organisations such as small e-commerce sites, holiday cottages, driving schools, cleaning products, accountants and financial advisers and even a lady from Chichester Cathedral. All of these organizations will have different needs when planning their online marketing, are targeting a wide range of audiences and probably use the internet in a range of different ways.

Louise and I write our posts weekly to assist small businesses in making the most of online marketing and best practice techniques. However, what we think you need help with may not be the same as what you really want help with, so we’d love to hear what challenges you’re facing. I’ve put together a short poll below (only one answer each) and if you can spare a minute or two, please complete it and we’ll do our best to help you with these issues!

I’m sure many of you have been beavering away planning your marketing strategy for 2010 and preparing for an upturn in business (fingers crossed!) Although you’ve probably included lots of activities to get your name out there, have you made concrete plans for your website? Have you really addressed how long it will take to increase traffic to your website?

One of the most important things to consider for your website is timing, and how long some activities will take to kick in. Having recently spoken to someone who thought that traffic would somehow dramatically increase with the launch of a new site, it struck me that she hadn’t planned ahead at all, and probably hoped that sales would rocket with a new site before Christmas – this isn’t going to happen.

If you’re planning a new site, then you must think ahead beyond the launch of it to when you might start to see traffic. You’re in a much better position if your site is well-established and you’re planning a re-launch, then you should find traffic bounces back fairly quickly once the search engines index your new site.

If your site’s a new venture, then you must think ahead to when you really need traffic and if you’re relying on Christmas traffic now, then it’s too late unless you pay for your visitors or try other avenues to promote your site.

Many small businesses still fail to think ahead with the timescales involved in seeing results from their website and do no research at all into SEO and internet marketing.

Internet marketing needs to be addressed before the site is even being built, in fact when you start working on your new business idea. Worrying about it once the site is built is far too late.

Sometimes I think we didn’t know the meaning of overwhelm before the internet came along!  The sheer volume of available information is both powerful and overpowering at the same time.

The online chatter is never-ending, as more and more people find their voices and contribute their expertise and opinions on just about anything under the sun.

Avoiding online overwhelm requires self-discipline, purpose and focus.

• While it is definitely essential to be a part of the social networks, you don’t need to be there 24/7.  Set aside, say, 30 minutes each day to take part in online conversations and be disciplined to stick to it.  Just as you might ration your children’s TV watching – or your chocolate intake – stop when your allocated time is up.
• Your tweets, Facebook updates and blog posts, etc. need to be part of a bigger plan, so it helps to prepare an outline of what you’re going to talk about online.  By incorporating social media tools into your overall marketing strategy a little at a time you’ll find out what works best for your business.
• A common mistake is to sign up or register for every new online network and then do very little to develop your presence (and yes, I am speaking from personal experience here!).  That’s like accepting every breakfast, lunch and evening local networking invitation you receive and just as impossible to fulfil.  Select and join 2 or 3 networks and work to become a part of those online communities.  If you then find you have time and want to join more, at least you’ll understand what’s involved.

How do you avoid online overwhelm?  We’d love to know!

I find the summer holidays are usually a very good time to review business processes, marketing materials and my website. Over the last few years, every summer I’ve made changes of some sort and this summer its time for a new website. With uncertainty about the economy still in the news, you need to make sure your site works harder than ever, so here are a few things that you should be looking at now to ensure your site performs at its best over the coming months.

1. Look at your website copy, does it inspire, is it clearly written and to the point? Are there strong calls to action?
2. Do you have up to date testimonials and case studies from clients – this is particularly important for service businesses as these can really help with sales, but of course, whatever you sell, you need testimonials!
3. Can visitors easily navigate your site and find what they’re looking for?
4. Are the promises you make on your website true? Don’t say you’ll dispatch items within 24 hours if it takes longer, equally if you can deliver quicker then do so as people expect quick delivery when buying online.
5. Make sure you respond to enquiries and sales questions quickly, slow responses could mean you send prospects to your competitors.
6. Check all the pages of your website work, and you have a 404 page on the site to cover any broken links or pages that have been taken down (we’ve covered this in a previous post and it’s particularly important if you’re planning on re-launching an existing website).
7. Send out an email newsletter regularly to ensure customers and prospects don’t forget about you and remind them of the services you offer and any new services you introduce.
8. Start a blog – search engines love blogs so if you can post regularly, you may soon find them appearing in search results. Make your posts interesting and engaging and you may find you begin to start up conversations with customers and prospects, you never know what it could lead to. Find other blogs to post comments on too.

I’ve worked on many websites over the years and despite increasing traffic and offering advice on ways to increase conversions, some customers don’t seem to see this as important. Search engine optimisation or pay per click alone does not equate to an increase in sales particularly if a website is poorly written. If you’re wondering why your website traffic isn’t producing sales and enquiries, then now is a very good time to look at many of the above points.

When meeting prospects or starting work with new clients, one thing I always try and do is manage their expectations. Many people still think that soon after launching a new site, they’ll soon see it ranking highly in the search engines, or if it’s been optimised, results should be seen in a short space of time. Unfortunately those days are long gone, and oh, if it were so easy!

Like any marketing, web marketing needs to be done proactively and consistently. Whether you’re advertising in a magazine, doing some PR or optimising your site, it’s an ongoing activity, not something that can be done as a one off and then forgotten about. Online marketing needs to be incorporated into the whole marketing mix, you can’t just rely on the search engines to build your business.

So, what should one’s expectations be when promoting a website?

Well, this depends on many factors, such as: how long the site has been around for, who is linking to the site, what resources are available to promote the site (time and money), how committed you are to achieving high rankings. The internet is highly competitive with more and more websites being launched every day – this is making it much harder to be seen and if you’re in a particularly competitive market, it’s those who spend the time and/or the money who are most likely to succeed. Even when you’re seen, is the message right? Is your website going to convince someone to contact you and not the next company that’s found?

What can a small business with limited funds do who’s keen to drive sales and enquiries through their website?

Commit time – the more time you can spend on promoting your site and adding fresh content regularly whether it be news, special offers or even starting a blog. Not forgetting those all important links, particularly if you’re a new site. Get found on appropriate industry websites, get some articles or news published on other sites, encourage people to link to you however you can.
Try things out – SEO isn’t the be all and end all, and let’s face it, with the frequency changes in rankings, it’s never been a good idea to rely solely on the search engines to deliver traffic. So try some pay per click ads, build up a list for a regular newsletter, be active on forums, write your own blog and post on other blogs, get into social networking. Even pay for a few well-placed links on targeted sites. There’s never been a better time to try things out with all the new, low-cost technology that’s available to the masses.
Be patient – don’t expect instant results because it just won’t happen. Be prepared to wait for your marketing efforts to pay off, whatever marketing you’re doing and keep repeating your message.
Don’t give up – as with anything, persistence generally pays off, so if you keep proactively marketing your business online, you’ll eventually be rewarded!

Last week I wrote about what to consider when planning your online marketing strategy. This week I want to give you a couple of tips for quick results, although, with any marketing, the best results are from long term activities. Remember that getting traffic to your website is only half of the story – your website also has to do the job of converting those visitors into prospects.

1. Pay per Click Advertising (PPC)
This is the quickest way to get a presence in the search engines and the 4 major search engines all have PPC offerings. Google Adwords, the most popular PPC platform shows its results on Google and a network of search sites which include Ask. Yahoo and Microsoft (MSN) also have their own PPC offerings. What you pay depends on how competitive your industry is and which keywords you choose to bid on. The more competitive the keywords, the more each click will cost.

2. Email Marketing
Email marketing can give you short term and long term results. Email newsletters can be set up very quickly and you can soon be up and running with a regular newsletter to your existing customers, prospects and contacts. However, growing your list takes time plus the fact you need to keep reminding your prospects regularly, so it can take a while before you see the benefits of your newsletter.

3. Writing Articles
Make sure you have a bank of articles written about your area of expertise that are ready to use, not only on your website and in your newsletter, but that you could use to distribute as content to other websites or even ask if they could be included in someone else’s newsletter. Articles are a great way of showing off your expertise and building credibility. As with email marketing, this is an activity that could yield quick results, but is better in the long term as you need to gain confidence with your readers.