Some people have heard me say this in the past
“It’s not your website provider’s job to give you a working website. It’s their job to give you a functional one; it’s your job to make it work”

What does that mean…REALLY?
       • It’s Your Job – to know what keywords to rank for
       • It’s Your Job – to create good content to make that site rank
       • It’s Your Job – to work to get the backlinks to your site

At the end of the day that is exactly what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Keywords, Good Content & Backlinks it is really that simple and also that hard…Why?

Because we have been conditioned to think our website provider is going to do it for us. I can’t tell you how many times I hear website providers tell dealers “Our sites rank better and have better SEO than what you have now” and how many times dealer change website providers because they think the new website will be the magic bullet to get them ranked better, more traffic and more leads…WRONG!

In fact the website is pretty much worthless without the right online marketing strategy.

“Reality… the website should be FREE”

It is the tool of the online marketer not the online marketing strategy and that’s why I say…

“You don’t need a website provider you need a web marketing company that provides websites”

Without the marketing the website has NO VALUE.

What does a good online marketing strategy look like? Like this:

Now here comes the sad part ¾ of this you can’t even do because you lease you website presence from your provider you don’t own the property, and even if you did manage to find a good way to optimize your site it would only be a matter of hours before the other guy down the road on the same website platform had it too.

“The Law of equal incompetence” You can be no better than the network you’re on.

“AS LONG AS YOU LEASE THE PROPERTY YOU CAN GET NO COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE”

So what’s a web marketer to do? Optimally:

1. Get your own website 
2. Start an aggressive PPC & landing page campaign find the keywords that convert and start your online marketing efforts with them
3. Create a lot of good relevant content in your website 400 pages plus around those keywords
4. Get a wordpress.org blog make sure you set it up as a subdomain of your website
5. Create 30 plus relevant SEO optimized blog posts per month around your target keywords 
6. Profile your customers & Facebook friends for interests 
7. Share through social 20 pieces of content per day relevant to your audience 
8. Integrate your social campaigns to your web presence to get the maximum traffic, SEO & conversion value 
9. Create at lease 50 Microsites, Landing Pages and / or Conversion Paths to focus traffic on a specific offer and provide easy conversion
10. Use behavior targeting to drive organic traffic to high converting landing pages 
11. ABT (ALWAYS BE TESTING) Split test everything often

I hope this post gets you thinking about your website and web marketing in a very different way, that was my goal.

If you want to know more or have questions we do a webinar on these very topics every Tuesday 1pm Central Standard Time , Click Here – Own Your Web Presence

Hope this helps

Larry Bruce – @pcmguy