3 Quick Web Marketing Wins to Start the Money Rolling In

When it comes to SEO, everyone wants an easy win. Unfortunately, SEO doesn’t lend itself to fast solutions that generate immediate top search engine rankings, especially for brand new websites. Anyone who’s been in the industry long enough will tell you that good web marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You truly have to be in it for the long haul if you want to succeed.

But that doesn’t mean there are not some quick victories to be had in the world of online marketing. These victories can be especially important for new businesses with new websites. There are a few strategies that, if implemented properly, can start generating some immediate results and revenue.

While these strategies represent just a fraction of what you can accomplish online, they make a good starting point for those times when getting sales today can mean the life or death of your company.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Running a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is one of the fastest ways to achieve quick sales. Google has made their AdWords manager incredibly simple for even the most novice users. But while is may be simple to set up, mastering it is a different question.

In fact, the ease of set up is what fools people into thinking that AdWords cannot be profitable for their business. Many businesses jump into an AdWords campaign and quickly give up because it’s not producing profits. But unless you have higher margins than the next guy, chances are, it’s not that AdWords can’t be beneficial for you, it’s that you’re not managing it profitably.

Proper AdWords campaign management is a combination of knowledge and skill. You must first have the knowledge of all the more complicated features that AdWords offers, and then you have to have the skill to set up and constantly manage your campaigns. In AdWords, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” You have to constantly be analyzing results, creating new ad groups, testing ads and landing pages, and organizing keywords to get the best ROI possible.

One of the best, but also most annoying, features of AdWords is that it is always changing. With every change, there is a wealth of new ROI opportunities, but there is also a new layer of complexity. However, staying up to date is worthwhile. The better managed your campaigns are the more profitable they will be while your less up-to-date competitor may be taking it in the chin.

Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing is a feature within AdWords, but it’s worthy of a separate mention. In fact, there are solutions out there that allow you to set up remarketing campaigns without getting into AdWords at all.

Remarketing allows you to, for lack of a better word, stalk visitors who have come to your site and then left without taking any action. You have vast amount of controls as to what ads you will show to these visitors and how often. Done right, it’s less like stalking than a happy reminder. Done wrong, it’s stalking, all creepy like.

Managed effectively, remarketing is a great reminder to visitors that they visited your site and that they may want to come back to complete what they set out to do. This can be especially potent as searchers “shop around.” Your ad will be a constant reminder of your site and may be a deciding factor in them returning to purchase from you rather than someone else.

With remarketing, you have the ability to target visitors differently based on the actions taken or pages visited on your site. If someone left items in their cart, you can present them with a coupon to come back and finish the purchase. If they viewed a certain item, you can show them an ad for that item specifically rather than a generic company ad.

All of this ads up (see what I did there?) to a vast amount of control and options you can use to bring visitors back and complete the tasks they set out to do. For them, it’s a satisfactory conclusion. For you, it’s money in the bank.

Website Architecture

One of the very first tasks we do when taking over the web marketing for a new website is to review the website architecture. What, exactly, constitutes website architecture? Good question. It’s pretty much any structural or coding issue with the site.

Some of the things we look for are broken links, spiderability of pages, proper heading tag usage, proper title tag and meta description usage, page load speeds, duplicate content, etc.

Not all website architectural changes are equal. Some changes will have a very small impact while others… well, they may be responsible for your site not getting off the ground. The most important issues to look for would be making sure search engines are able to spider all your pages within just a few “clicks” of the home page and that you don’t have duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, or content throughout the site.

Your site navigation can also be a big problem if the pages your visitors are most likely to want are hidden under layers of drop-downs and fly-outs.

Architecture improvements will do more than help your site with the search algorithms. It’ll also help your visitors achieve their goals. For many sites, that is a direct correlation to sales. The more of those you get, the quicker you are to succeed.

While each of the strategies noted above can be implemented for some quick wins, don’t assume that means that’s all there is to do. Far from it! Digging into these areas and getting the quick victory is still just the tip of the iceberg.

Once you’ve done the initial work, keep investing, reviewing, tracking, and testing changes and fixes. The more invested you are in these “quick” victories, the more long-term success you’ll find.