It’s all well and good to have a pretty – and a well-written and popular – website, but what if you have all this, but potential customers are still not ringing or emailing?

If this is the case, it may mean that the traffic to your website is not targeted, so the visitors were never going to buy your product or service anyway. Maybe they came expecting something else? Or maybe they were just looking for information, rather than looking to purchase.

The solution to this is pretty simple – it’s about doing effective online marketing in order to give searchers what they are looking for, when they are looking for it, and then having a strong call to action to encourage them to contact you.

Some of this will cost you a little bit of money, some will take time. But let’s face it, marketing will either cost you money or time and if you do it well, the payoffs will be worth it.

The first thing to do is to set up engine advertising campaign using something like Google Adwords, using the keywords that you have already identified. Adwords can be a bit hit and miss if you are unsure what you are doing, so it pays to have a company such as Direct Sites Online [N1] set up your campaign for you.

Once you’ve set up your campaign, it is vital that you track it via Google Analytics – which is pretty straightforward even for the layperson. Again, Direct Sites Online assist you in  setting up Analytics on your website.

This way, you know what messages are working, and what aren’t.

A great idea to track whether your Adwords campaign is working is to set up a special 1300 number, or email address, that is ONLY promoted and linked via your search engine advertising. Set up a landing page for the campaign and again, track the leads which became sales – then you can tweak the landing page to see if those numbers can improve with different calls to action.

Along with the above search engine advertising campaigns, you need to make it easy for your customers to contact you.

This means setting up a toll-free number, and easy-to-remember email address and an easy-to-find “contact us” form.

Then you need to make all of these prominent on your website, and you must link to them with a call-to-action for every service or product.

And there’s no such thing as too many appearances of this information on your material. You can put your number and email at the top of every page, at the bottom of every page as well as throughout the copy.

It’s like leading a horse to water, and then ensuring it takes a drink.

Next, you can use your content to qualify leads – in other words, quickly sorting the wheat from the chaff. Having lots of phone call and emails is no good if they don’t turn into sales.

This is where the information you display on you site comes to the fore. Visitors should know within the first paragraph or two of a landing page if this is something they will eventually purchase. Thus, not wasting your staff’s valuable time with phone calls and emails that won’t improve the bottom line.

The last thing you want is to encourage leads that are unserviceable, so it’s important that you identify your target audience and that the copy is tailored for them.

And if you offer more than one product or service, it may even pay to create different landing pages, with different content, depending on the Adwords campaign (or campaigns) that is running at the time.

Finally, when setting up your Adwords campaign, take advantage of the option to choose negative keywords – that is keywords that you don’t want your business to be found using.

For example, if you run a wedding planning business that caters to the higher end of the market, you don’t want to be found when people search for “budget wedding planners” or “cheap wedding planners” or “no-frills wedding planners.

If you want to turn visitors into sales, contact Direct Sites online now at ino@directsitesonline.com or phone 02 9557 7623.