By: Master Web Creations
3/22/2006

The key to any marketing campaing is measuring ROI and the best way to monitor your website's results is to know how your clients came to contact you. Many times, they will tell you, but if they don't, just ask. If you run a service business, it's easy to keep a simple spreadsheet of new clients listing the service you provided and the marketing tool that brought them to you, whether it is through an existing client, your website, a phonebook listing, a newspaper ad or any other form of marketing, your website is a part of your marketing campaign - not the only marketing tool you rely on for business.

Not even online-only e-commerce sites are exceptions, for they have past customers and if those customers are happy, they'll tell a friend who is looking for a product avalable at that site. Sometimes, you can't always ask a customer directly how they were refered to you, and in these cases, a survey can fill in the blanks. Most people are helpful, but sometimes they just don't want to take the time. Keeping your surveys fewer than ten questions and making sure they can see the end of it will help. You can conduct surveys on postcards or on your website to keep costs to a minimum. Conducting a survey can also help you to answer other questions you have about your audience and customers to provide better services based on their needs.

You can see more specific results of your website marketing if you have a website statistics program that tells you

• what keywords on what search engines brought users to your site,
• how many users visited your site each day, month and year,
• what pages they looked at, for how long and more.

These programs are usually available through your website hosting company, others can be purchased through third parties.

So how do you market a marketing too? If you have a black and white pring ad that's 2X3, you use newspapers, if you have an 8X11 full-color ad, you use magazines and if you have a website, you use it on all of your other marketing materials.

letterhead	brochures
business cards	advertising

The next big step to making sure your prospective clients find you on the web is through search engines and online directories. To make sure your prospects find your site, make sure you have a search engine-friendly site.

1. Your site should be mostly text.
2. Your site's content should be keyword-rich
3. Your navigation should be keyword-rich text.
4. Your web pages should have descriptive titles and keyword-rich descriptions.
5. Your website should be complete, up-to-date and frequently updated or refreshed with new content.

While that seems basic, it sometimes isn't. There's a little more to carefully constructing good content. For example, if you have too much content it can be messy and difficult to read as well as rendering your search engine optimization techniques useless. Page content should use headings, short paragraphs and bulleted lists because your website is designed for you users and search engines should be considered only after your audience. While your content should be keyword-rich, it still needs to make beautiful sense. A secondary goal to writing good content is measuring your keyowrd density. For your primary keyword phrase on a particular page, it should be:

• at the beginning of your page title and description,
• at least part of the pagename and navigation link,
• in the beginning of your page heading and
• at least once in the beginning of your page content, or the first sentence of the first paragraph.

You should have just enough content to keep the prospective clients interes, using a unique angle, to get them to contact you for more information or idally, for your sevice. Altogether, you should aim to have 20% of your page content as your primary keyword phrase for that page.

If possible, you could build link popularity for your website in general, or for specific pages of your site whenever and wherever you have the ability to do so. If you are a member of a chamber of commerce, a community website or forums, you can request or create a link to your site in those places. You could exchange links with local or complementary service sites, or your vendors, for example. You can get creative and build relationships, as well.

If your optimized web pages aren't generating as muc ROI as you would like, consider more supplemental content relative to your industry, including a resources page, articles and newsletters. Still there are PPC campaigns like Google AdWords, convenient for small business budgets. Google AdWords costs $5 to sign up and you can set your monthly spending to a minimum of $30 per month. You could also make money with your site by displaying banners or pay to have your banners on other sites.

It seems like a lot of work, but should only be a 4 - 8 hour investment per month.

~ a www.masterwebcreations.com article