$1,500 question

[_Z_]

I have $1,500 to spend to promote 8 years old website.

Almost no SEO work was done for the site in the past 3-4 years. The site has a couple hundreds (around 300) external backlinks pointing to the homepage, and around 30 backlinks pointing to internal pages. It gets around 60% traffic from referring sites, 30% direct, and 10% from SE. The homepage has PR 4. It ranks around 70th place in Google rankings for one of the main keywords. No keyword research has been done for the site. Looking for long term benefits.

What would be the best way, in your opinion, to spend this money?

[RyanKent]

The first step I would recommend is to examine the site itself.

Any form of promotion depends on what visitors find when they arrive at the site. No matter how good your site appears, you will retain a percentage of visitors while others will not be happy and move on. You want to retain the highest percent of visitors possible, and convert them towards whatever your site goals are such as sell a product/service, complete a form, register, etc.

Site improvements vary greatly depending on the site. A few possibilities are improved layout, A/B testing, logo or art work, design work, social integration and acquiring trust symbols. Anything change you can make to better connect with visitors and earn their trust would be beneficial.

Once your site is solid, the next step is content. You could generate new content, infographics, images, videos, etc.

Only once you have a well designed site and some solid content which visitors will want to see would I recommend working on promoting the site. Until you reach this point, there is too much leakage (i.e. bounced visitors) to promote most sites.

[_Z_]

Thanks for the answer Ryan.

In the past few months I improved the site's design and content considerably, and there is not too much room for improvement in that area anymore. There are always things to improve, off course, but not too much, and not something that will change revenue drastically.

In other words the site is ready for some minor work on design and content , and at the same time there is a lot of room in figuring out ways of bringing quality visitors to the site. I would like to spend these $1,500 to bring quality visitors to the site, and spread the word around. Any ideas about what would be a good $1,500 investment in this area?

What would be a desirable bounce rate? This site has around 50% right now.

[RyanKent]

Without seeing your site, understanding your product niche, knowing your customer base, etc. any advice offered is completely blind.

Your focus is promoting your site to build traffic. This can happen through SEO, SEM, social networking promtion or ads, and almost any sort of marketing. You can make a viral video or a bumper sticker which says "LionsFan.com" (if that was your site). The possibilities are almost endless.

Without any idea of your market, I am not willing to make any specific recommendations.

[_Z_]

Fair enough. Like you said without knowing the website you can't give anything else then general recommendations.

Not really sure where to go from here. Do you offer private consultation for somebody like me?

[RyanKent]

I can be reached via e-mail: Ryan@Vitopian.com.

[_Z_]

Thanks, I emailed you.