The concept of a website is no longer a new concept, but are you leveraging this key marketing tool to drive increased revenue? Too many companies develop a website just to have a presence online. The problem with this approach is that no one can find the website unless they already know the name of the company or the URL – in such a case, no marketing is necessary. Is this really how you want to drive results with your website?

Your website can actually serve as your most powerful marketing tool. It provides a unique opportunity to tell the visitor about your company, what you have to offer and why they want to do business with you. If you do this well, you have a captivated audience willing to stick around and learn more. If you skimp on some important design and content areas, the visitor is more likely to bounce off of your site and move on to your competitor. Don’t serve as the catalyst to drive business for the competition – leverage your online real estate and make it work for you.

The most important focus for your website is to create a reason for visitors to stick around. Become the expert in your field and optimize for search engine results on everything you add to the site. If you present your site as the authority in your niche field, visitors will return multiple times to gather information, make a purchase or recommend your site to others.

To build this authoritative status, it’s important that you regularly add content to your site. You must be selective on the content you add, ensuring that it not only adds value, but that it is optimized for your selected keywords. Be sure you add a few things every week to keep your content fresh. Offer value-added content, including white papers, videos and even apps. Visitors will come to expect these additions and will return repeatedly to gain new information and pass it along.

Don’t focus your efforts on appealing to a broad audience as you can quickly lose focus of your core message, jumbling it before it can benefit the potential customer. You still have to focus on that niche – identify those that fit into your niche market, those who will benefit from your authoritative site. Gear your content towards this audience and you not only market your brand, products and services, you will notice your customers will start to become advocates for you.

Finally, don’t forget the social media. It can be a powerful tool to send potential customers to your authority site. Regular and valuable postings can also help you to drive search rankings for your keywords, so post regularly and post with a purpose, driving your niche audience to your site.

Once visitors arrive on your site, capture their information by offering something for free. Authoritative white papers, apps and exclusive videos are great tools for capturing visitor information. This allows you to build out your database and target those individuals interested in what you have to offer.