Marketing and promotion – Some enterprises lend themselves more readily to search engine marketing than others: ceramic tiles are very difficult to promote because of the wide use of both the words ceramic and tile; a website selling Bewick engravings is going to be much easier to promote due to the proper noun.

Some important considerations are:
• Getting useful traffic to your website – as opposed to inappropriate leads that waste your resources • Keywords/meta tags – important for some search engines but not the principal one: Google • Offline promotion – frequently more important than online promotion Operational issues • Once the website is up and running there will be costs involved in promoting and maintaining it. Out-of-date websites are a turn-off for visitors and are therefore counterproductive. • Keeping the content of your website fresh may turn into something akin to magazine production where there is a need for continuous input. This requires the content management to be someone’s responsibility on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis as appropriate. In other cases it may just be a question of keeping an events list up-to-date. • Self-managed websites frequently suffer from poor copywriting, spelling and grammar thus leading to lower credibility and business confidence. Ideally whoever does manage the content should have a strong command of the grammar and composition of English (or the chosen language). • There may be a need to train staff in website administration – we’ve tried to make our system as easy as possible.
• Website requirements evolve, sometimes quite quickly, so a review process needs to be put in place

In today’s market, building a business website is not enough. A great website without SEO and SEM is best compared to a great business card sitting in your drawer. Your site is not only a great source of information for existing clients but also a vehicle for lead generation, decreased sales cycles, and new customers. Well planned and executed SEO and SEM techniques can increase sales.

Website analytics has a direct relevance to SEO and SEM. Analytics, in a nutshell, documents statistical information about website traffic. Website analytics can provide a host of information about your website visitors including their geographic location and company name which in turn can help you optimize SEO and SEM efforts. With website analytics, you will know what pages on your website rank highest and who visits them.

A company website – especially one that attracts high quality, targeted traffic – can be a great, inexpensive way to reach potential customers with targeted marketing messages. Incorporating your USP into messaging throughout the site communicates the value of doing business with you and leads to higher conversion (leads, sales, downloads, etc.).

In order to track activity on a site and have a tool such as Google Analytics display the data in highly visualized reports, we embed a simple code into every page of a website. Once the analytics tool is configured to track specific activity on a site, you receive the information you need to write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics is very easy to use and implement at a basic level yet requires a high level of knowledge and expertise to accomplish advanced tasks (tracking exit clicks, downloads, ecommerce revenue, marketing campaigns, goals, sales funnels, etc.).

Yes. All business directly related to the website (e-commerce sales, orders, leads, inquiries, etc.) is tracked with 100% accuracy using Website Analytics tools.

A blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. A corporate blog can be used internally to enhance communication and culture in a corporation or externally for marketing, branding or public relations purposes.

Should a blog be part of your website? Yes and no. There are several advantages to having a blog, but these benefits are only achieved when the blog is updated regularly with valuable content. Unfortunately, this can be a significant time commitment. For companies who are not willing to put in the time and effort, it is better not to have a blog than to have a blog that hasn’t been updated in months.

Here are some of the main advantages of having a blog:
• Blogs can enhance your web exposure in Search Engine rankings, • Blogs can be an extremely authentic voice for your company • Blogs can be a powerful PR tool. Blogs allow companies to respond effectively to postings about their organization in the blogosphere • Blogging culture encourages linking to other blogs which can improve the number of visitors to your site. Keep in mind: Your competitors are probably blogging or thinking about it.

Yes. A website alone is just the first step towards a successful web presence. A website without a marketing plan is analogous to a business card sitting inside a desk drawer. You need to start driving quality traffic to your site by executing a strategic web marketing plan. The elements of such a plan are e-mail marketing, banner ads, search engine optimization, pay-per-click campaigns, online PR, etc. Ask your CMTC consultant for more details about our strategic web marketing services.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. The PCI DSS is administered and managed by the PCI SSC (www.pcisecuritystandards.org), an independent body that was created by the major payment card brands (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover).

Yes. We can integrate e-newsletter registration into the website allowing visitors to sign up for your newsletter. Once you build a significant amount of contacts (mailing list), you can start e-mail marketing campaigns in addition to sending out your newsletter to potential customers. Ask your CMTC consultant for more details about our email marketing services.

Email marketing is, as the name suggests, the use of email in marketing communications. It is a highly effective, inexpensive, immediate, and measurable way of sending direct promotional messages to try and acquire new customers or persuade existing customers to buy again. Email marketing is definitely one of the most powerful marketing tools available to businesses of all types and sizes. Ask your CMTC consultant for more details about our e-mail marketing services.

Once your site objectives are established, you can measure progress toward meeting those objectives through the use of a conversion funnel. A conversion is a term used by marketers to describe the final outcome of a site visit. This can be an online purchase or various other desired actions. On an e-commerce site, a conversion is obviously a sale. For a content site, it might be the number of newsletter subscriptions. A desirable lead-generation site conversion is a white paper download. A self-service site might be looking for fewer calls to a call center since these are measures of customer satisfaction.

Each step in the sales process on the way to conversion is marked by visitor drop off. It is a challenge to measure your website's conversion rate because there are a number of steps leading to the final action, and sometimes visitors are thwarted in their quest to complete an intended action. Additionally, many sites measure only their final conversion rate. However, this does not give them the opportunity to improve drop-off by analyzing the sales path then finding the bottlenecks and making the site improvements that result in higher conversions

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or search engine marketing campaigns display text ads beside search engine results generated by keywords which your potential customers frequently use during web searches.

Our PPC services include:
• Keyphrase research and identification
• Google Adwords setup and management
• Ad copywriting, ad monitoring and adjustments
• Google Analytics and Webmasters setup and integration with Google AdWords
• Monthly executive reports

Ask your CMTC consultant for more details about our PPC or Search Engine Marketing services.

There are two major categories of links and both play an important role in your online marketing strategy, especially in your Search Engine Marketing strategy. Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site; outbound links are links on your site pointing to external websites. Inbound links are important because each link acts as a “vote” from another site towards your website. The more votes you receive, the better search engine ranking your website will achieve (the process of building quality inbound links is called link building). Inbound links can also be considered entrances to your site. (A visitor can reach a website in three ways: knowing the URL and typing it directly into a web browser; searching for your keywords in search engines; and referrals from sites that link to your site.) Outbound links are your “votes” for other sites and possible exits from your site. If you vote for a competitor site, providing an exit from your won site, you will lose visitors. Carefully selected, strategically placed quality outbound links can help your visitors and even your search engine rankings. You do not need permission to link to another website.

The concept of the sales funnel is very important to the setup of your business website. A site which is designed with a specific GOAL in mind can serve as a machine for your business, generating either sales or leads (and ultimately cash in the bank). The sales funnel is called a “funnel” for a specific reason. Think of the funnel used to put oil in your car. No matter how sloppy you are when pouring that oil, as long as it ends up in the funnel, it will make its way into your engine. The funnel will focus all the oil to the single entry point into your engine. Now, take that concept and apply it to your business. You have a specific goal for your website (a sale, a lead, etc) and your site is supposed to serve as a funnel to drive all incoming traffic into your goal. That is the theory, but of course you cannot expect to funnel ALL of your traffic into your goal. Not every visitor is going to buy something. But, you can continually tweak your site so as to increase the number of people which convert to a sale (this is your conversion rate).

Here is a typical sales funnel design:
1. Person comes to the business website. They are looking to solve something and are checking you out to see if you are the one to do it.
2. Your site converts the person into a real lead either by having them buy something small, sign up for a free quote, or subscribe to your newsletter.
3. Now that you have their identity, you set up automatic ways of nurturing that relationship, building your perceived value to them, and selling them more expensive products or services.
4. At the end of the successful sales funnel, you now have a very loyal customer who will practically buy anything you offer to them