The Website Marketing Checklist
When you’re setting out to market your website, it’s so hard to know where to begin! Having a checklist is a great way to start, because you can really see how far you have come. Remember: you don’t have to do this all today. Go ahead and print it out so you can see how far you have already come, and you don’t lose momentum when you feel like you’ve run out of things to do.
Your Website
If you are ready to market your website, you probably already have one. Still, there are plenty of tweaks to make your website work for you better.
- Decide which keywords to focus on
- Incorporate a keyword into every title tag, site-wide
- Incorporate relevant keywords into the meta tag text, site-wide
- Write an engaging About Us page
- Include contact information (as many as possible)
- Set up analytics to track SEO progress
- Send a sitemap to Google
- A/B test your webpages
- Create landing pages for other marketing campaigns (PPC, social media, etc.)
- Research and implement link-building strategies
Your Blog
A blog is a powerful tool to make connections with your customers, prove your expertise, and improve your site’s search engine rankings.
- Start a blog on your site’s domain name (not WordPress.com or Blogspot)
- Write a blog post (or multiple posts) on long-tail keywords and information relevant to your customers – be generous with your expertise
- Respond to comments
- Publish RSS feeds of blog posts
- Track RSS subscribers
- Encourage social sharing
- Submit a blog post to a hub in your niche
- Use social bookmarking tools to bookmark your content
- Display related posts below each post
- Display most popular posts on the main blog page
- Write a guest post for a related blog with links back to your company page or blog
- Create an infographic
- Discuss current events
- Respond to other blog posts in your niche (be sure to link back to them)
Email marketing
Email campaigns help keep a company in a user’s mind long after a website visit or a purchase.
- Choose an email provider
- Put an opt-in form on your website to start collecting email addresses
- Add an opt-in form to the “purchase completed” screen or email
- Create an email template
- Decide how regularly to send out informational newsletters or promotions
- Create a whitepaper, ebook, or product to give away in exchange for email subscriptions
- Start an email list for an upcoming event or product
Social Media
Be ready to engage in conversations in social media, but realize that it is not a good place to use hard-sell tactics. Instead, establish your reputation and let customers come to you.
- Claim your brand name on Twitter
- Create a company page on Facebook
- Create a company profile on LinkedIn
- Link profiles back to custom landing pages
- Post a link to an article or blog post your audience would find interesting
- Join a conversation related to your niche (without promoting your site)
- Answer a question
- Ask a question
- Create a poll
- Upload a photo
- Add social media icons to your email campaign
- Add social media icons to your website
- Run a contest or give-away
Off-line
Building relationships offline can have a very real impact on your growth online.
- Add your website to your business cards
- Add your website to your letterhead
- Attend a networking event that would interest your potential customers
- Speak at an event
Local search
If your business is a brick-and-mortar store, make sure you are still reaching out to customers online.
- Add details to your online company search listings (Google Places, etc.)
- Add photos to your online company search listings
- Display your address, hours, etc. so that new visitors can find your store easily
- Offer a deal through a daily deals site like Groupon
- Reward users checking in to your location using location-based apps like Foursquare
PPC
PPC gives you the opportunity to target your potential customers very precisely. Make sure your PPC results are worth the amount of money you are putting into a PPC campaign.
- Create an account on a PPC service like AdWords
- Start a PPC campaign for one of your keywords
- Enable and view analytics regularly
Are there any actions you would add to this list? Help out your fellow website owners!
Author Info
Written by Ralph Matlack
Ralph Matlack is a Group Product Manager in Intuit’s Grow Your Business division where he leads the strategy and development of the Intuit Websites offering. Having founded and run two bootstrap startups prior to Intuit, he also has a first-hand appreciation of the challenging part-salesperson, part-accountant, part-human resources, part-janitor roles that small business owners have. He loves golf, beer, college football, and summer trips to Sweden with his family. You can follow Ralph on Twitter at @rematlack.
this post should someone print out and installed on every lantern in london
I WANT A SEARCH ENGINE ON MY SITE. WHY WILL IT NOT ALLOW ME R=TO EDIT?
Extensionsby GoogleHighlight to Search (by Google)
Highlight to Search (by Google)
highlight-to-search-extension
Free
Highlight to Search allows you search keywords by highlighting instead of typing them into a search box.
Hi KELLY MOORE,
I think you’re asking about having a search capability on your website – is that correct? You can have a search box on your site, but you do have to obtain the code for it from a third party – Sitebuilder doesn’t have this capability.
Extensionsby GoogleHighlight to Search (by Google) is a sort of plug in application to Google Chrome that highlights keywords on a page and allows you to search on them. It only works in Chrome and isn’t a search engine per se.
If you can provide a few more details, I’ll be happy to try to help. Thank you!
cant find my web site
American Special Investigative Services
Thank you,
Bryan
hello I would like to know if my web page I can put a php code as entered or if I can make a picture for customers to leave comments and appear on the website
How do I get an RSS Feed button for my blog on the domain site
This is a great way to be able publish and build a web site , for those us who are just getting started in setting up a web site.
The above checklist is interesting, but all the abbreviations and inside language is useless to a novice. Perhaps each item could have a link that would elaborate on the information. I am having a problem with having my web URL come up correctly. It should be leannemeiercoaching.com and that worked at first. Now if it comes up at all it comes up under leanneelaine.com. This was an old URL that I used in class to get started. Help! leanne
My designed website has six pages. Although I have “published” all six, only the home
page shows up with no options to access other pages.
I’ve obviously done something wrong. Any ideas would be appreciated.
It would be very helpful if links were added to your suggestions and instructions so that if we see a suggestion listed and see it as great, we can click on it to go to the proper place to do that. And for non-techies like myself, an explanation of that particular subject would be helpful. There are often terms and words that are specific and if you are not familiar with that word, a glossary reference with link from the word would be a great thing to have.
The website does not come up on Google Search. Why?
I have been promoting my Real Estate website for quite some time. I think the hardest part is maintaining your blog. I would like more tips on blog writing and best practices. Also is it really better to start a blog on intuit’s site-builder or use the more popular word press blog?
Any help is greatly appreciated.