Companies adopt various marketing techniques to advertise their business among their prospective customers. Among all the techniques, online marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your potential clients in a cost effective manner. Unlike the expensive television and newspaper advertisements, online marketing can yield long-term results, which will help you in achieving your business goals more efficiently in the long run.

All the online marketing techniques and strategies will boil down to one focal point, which is attracting targeted traffic to business websites. If you still do not have a website for your business, it clearly means that you are giving a free space for your competitors to eat into your business share. You will need to do something about it today.

Now the question is, “why are many businesses still unable to get customers in spite of having a website?”

Well, the answer to this question is quite complex. It is mostly a combination of reasons rather than one single reason that is responsible for poor results of your online marketing campaigns.

Let us look at a few of the important ones:

• The design of your website has many flaws
• Your marketing follow-ups are either ineffective or absent
• The quality of your content is way below the required standards
• You do not have a proper online marketing plan in place
• You have not explored the social media marketing option

In addition to all these reasons, there might be a few things that you might be doing wrong or unethical, in your pursuit of reaching out towards your prospective customers. Now, let us look into these issues individually.

The design of your website is flawed:

The design of your website has to ideally provide a smooth experience to your visitors. The combination of design, template, color combinations, font styles and sizes, usage of multimedia and widgets, programming of dynamic or interactive pages, and integration with social media are responsible for enhancing the user experiences. However, they should be organized optimally with a proper sense of user understanding.

The problem with amateur designers is that they tend to overdo everything, which will only end up in slowing down the performance of your websites. Your web designer should understand the core values of your business and your target audience, so that they can design the pages that will create a direct appeal with them.

Using of flash and animation optimally will surely help you in attracting the interest of your visitors. However, if you overdo that, it will backfire in more than one way. Primarily, the search engine crawlers will be unable to read the text that is embedded in the flash files. Of course, they will be able to read the file name.

Additionally, too much of flash will also slow down the loading of pages, which will end up in irritating your customers, and they will simply close your website and look up for other websites for help.

Also the font size and styles that you use should directly appeal to your target audience. For example, you cannot possibly use pink color on websites that sell man’s motorcycle jackets. The colors and fonts that you use should ideally create a feeling of familiar territory among your potential buyers.

Responsive website design:

You will need to remember that people these days prefer accessing internet from their smartphones and tablet PCs. The websites which look absolutely stunning on the PCs might not be ideal for small screens. Your website visitors might have to put up with a lot of scrolling and too small buttons, which could only ruin the user experiences on your website. Therefore, the web design should also be compatible with smaller screens and varying picture resolutions.

Changes and updates:

In most cases, your website design will be a onetime job, but you cannot overlook the scopes for changes in the future. Ideally, your web design should be scalable to accommodate the changes that you will need to make when your business grows.

Of course, you might not hit the winning formula on your very first attempt. The changes on your website are inevitable, one way or the other. The web designer whom you choose must be willing to understand this very important point, and must be competent enough to incorporate the changes according to various business scenarios.

If you are running an e-Commerce website, then you will obviously need to make constant changes, depending upon your sales and arrival of new products. In this case, your web developer should provide you with a user friendly admin control panel for managing your inventory in a very efficient manner.

Your online marketing follow-ups are either ineffective or absent:

It is not just enough if you have a business website with Home Page, Services Page, Contact Page, and About Us page. Targeted visitors to your website are like gold mine, and you will need to make all efforts to convert them as your customers.

In addition to the regular pages, you will require lead generation page, pages on social media networking websites, and preferably a blog, in order to bring about more awareness and participation from your potential customers.

While some of your visitors might be readily willing to do business with you, there will be a big percentage of them who need a little nudge from your end to help them with decision making.

You could convince them to sign up for your newsletters, which can be done by entering their contact information on your lead generation page. You could also send them to your blog to understand more about how you can cater to their needs.

The bottom line is that you will need to engage with all your probable customers in order to improve the sale conversion numbers on your website.

The quality of your content is way below the required standards:

The very meaning of the phrase ‘quality content’ has changed quite frequently in the past few years. What was considered as quality content before five years might be even considered as spam content now.

Website owners used to stuff niche related keywords in their content, just to appease to the search engine crawlers. Well, that used to work quite nicely in the past, and such websites might even have reached the top rankings. Black hat SEO and spamming techniques like Keyword harvesting and keyword farming do not work anymore.

People, who thought that they could get away by fooling the search engines, literally saw their websites disappear overnight, after the algorithm changes and updates from top search engines like Google.

Key points that determine content quality:

• Plagiarism is a cardinal sin in content writing business. Copying and pasting of contents from other resources on the net or anywhere else is absolutely unacceptable. You could get penalized from both fronts, which is from the search engines and copyright laws.
• Although using of keywords is an integral part of SEO for creating contents for websites and other resources, you cannot simply overdo it. Not only does it ruin the flow of your content, your website could also be a red flagged for spamming.
• While doing the keyword research, SEO professionals will come up with some types of keywords that simply cannot be used for framing sentences grammatically. Although such weird sentences have helped many websites in the past, search engines are becoming more particular about the quality of grammar used on the content as well.

Well, the bottom-line is that you will need to create your contents that add true value to the readers, rather than trying to attract the search engine crawlers. If you do it otherwise, the search engines will eventually find out about it, and then they will surely come down hard on you, which is by either demoting the search engine ranking of your website, or by banning your website altogether.

Good practices:

Create the contents that will help your prospective customers in understanding all about how your business can help them, or cater to their needs. If they have to buy your products or services, then you will need to give them all the good reasons for doing that. Make sure that you use the keywords optimally, and also make sure that they do not distort the quality of language that you use.

Some websites have great quality contents, but their promotional contents posted on other web resources do not maintain that kind of quality. You will need to be very consistent in delivering quality content to your targeted audience. In a way, it will market your business for a long time, and the reputation of your business will reflect on the type of contents you publish online.

You do not have a proper online marketing plan in place:

Some webmasters expect the traffic flow to magically find their websites, which is never going to happen unless they have proper marketing strategies in place. When it comes to marketing businesses online, the primary sources for getting targeted audiences are obviously the search engines. That is precisely why Search Engine Optimization or SEO occupies the big chunk of online marketing strategies.

Let us first put this fact into perspective, online marketing is going to be an ongoing process and not a onetime job. Even big businesses will need to market their products or services in order to stay ahead of competition.

Success of your online marketing strategies will depend on two things:

• Creating a professionally designed website, with all the ingredients needed to attract the search engines.
• Ongoing marketing strategies to attract new customers, and also to drive repeat business from the existing customers.

Aggressive marketing is very important, but there is a very thin line that separates ethical practices from the non ethical ones. You would expect your business to grow and expand in the long run, so you will need to make sure that the credibility of your business does not get hampered due to unacceptable marketing techniques.

You have not explored the social media marketing option:

SEO professionals might not have heard about social media marketing before 8 to 10 years. The reality is that the social media networking websites have now hit our lives like nothing else has ever before, and there is just no escaping them. Be it from their PCs or from their mobile phones, people are always indulging themselves in various social media networking websites.

Social media websites like FaceBook have even recorded 1 billion active users in a month. Such being the case, you can not afford to ignore the marketing potentials presented by the powerful social media platforms. Not only can you share information about your web pages on the social media networking websites, you could also share the contents that are published on other directories and web sources.

The best thing about social media networking websites is that your business information can travel virally, and reach many networks faster. You can bring about more and more awareness about your business products or services. Also, you can engage with your potential and existing customers, which will play a major role in growing your brand name in the long run.

Now, let us look at some solutions:

In this post, I have touched upon the points that are important for marketing your businesses online. The entire process, starting from choosing a domain name and designing your website, to marketing and promoting your business on the search engines and social media networking websites can be quite complex, especially if you do not have any prior experiences.

All these things are very time consuming, and you cannot possibly do them all by yourself. Therefore, the best option is to choose a reliable service provider, who will not only help you with developing your website, but also assist you with ongoing marketing campaigns to attract more and more targeted customers to your website.

Additionally, if they are able to create quality content for your website and other promotional material, it will surely be an added benefit for your business. It is always convenient to have a one point contact for all your business needs. All the above mentioned points will help you in making the right to decision while choosing a web designing company that will also offer SEO services.