Internet Marketing - 25 Nov 2014

Business Tips for the Digital Age

The Vancouver retail market is complex and constantly expanding. In order to stay abreast of the competition a solid website design and proper management of your SEO is absolutely crucial. In this modern age of digital advertising,social marketing and networking failing to use the available tools will result in your business being passed by the competitors that are using the tools properly and to their best advantage.

If you are brand new to the Vancouver market or a well-established business wondering how to adjust, the keys to doing business in Vancouver today include professional web design and well managed SEO. If you don’t know what SEO is, you are already behind, and that should be a red flag for you. Before we talk too much about that let’s talk about the website itself.

Your business website needs a few minimum things in today’s world.

1. A target market and demographic information. Tailoring you website to reach your clients is spending money in the right place and not adopting a shotgun approach to reaching new business or encouraging repeat customers.

2. Clean and simple design that is informative and customer focused. We are past the days where you can use marketing and advertising to brag about how long you’ve been in business or why your technology is superior to others. Potential customers seldom care about that up front. Your website readers are looking for something that helps them. They only speak one language, and it’s WIIFM. That’s and acronym for “What’s In It For Me? Get customer focused with every page, and try to deliver only what they want.

3. Professional design. Yes your neighbour’s nephew could design a website for you. Or you could spend a couple of hours building a site yourself with software or using templates from any of the many online website hosting companies, but the truth is neither of those are professional or effective in the long term. You will need a dynamic site that represents your business with unique page and table designs that highlight your customer’s needs. It will need to be updateable, intuitive, and have easy navigation so your customers can find what they need fast. And in most cases it should be cross platform optimized and mobile compatible. You and the nephew probably aren’t up to speed on that aspect of things.

With those basics of a website you have begun the journey into the digital universe and are on the way to improving business but you aren’t there yet you need SEO, another piece of the puzzle.

SEO is how the people of Vancouver use the internet to find you. Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, scan the internet for information that matches the search terms users enter. If you have made certain that all aspects of your online business contain those searched for terms, you appear higher in the search results. You are Search Engine Optimized. The higher you rank the more people see the link to your business website first when they search for those terms.

Once again you probably need professional help on this. There is a series and set of practices that analyze results and searches and are able to tweak your information to help rank you better. The better you rank the more likely you are to reach more potential customers and improve client and sales numbers.