In This Chapter

• Tying your collateral and your website together
• Answer customer questions on your site
• What other content do you have?
• How can you serve your customers better?

Whether you work out of your house or have a storefront in the local mall, there's more to your business than a website. If you have a retail store or office, it's quite possible that the majority of your customers come from the physical world rather than the online world. That means all those online customers who are seeking your product or service haven't yet found you.

You want these potential customers to find you, and to do that, you need to integrate both your online and offline marketing efforts into a single, coherent vision. A mistake that many companies make is to have their online and offline efforts completely separate. An antiques store that sells its best items through eBay auctions typically has no information about eBay in its store. An art gallery rarely points customers to its website to learn about upcoming showings or view additional works from the artists.

Part of growing your business with Google is integrating all of your marketing and sales efforts, so that every online visitor knows that you have a retail outlet or office, and so that every visitor to your store knows that you also have a website, how to find it, and why it's worth a visit.

Tip: Don’t think of your online efforts as separate from your other marketing and publicity efforts. They’re all facets of a coherent, considered whole.

There are many different facets to this integration, from including your website address on your business cards to having a virtual tour of your facility on the website.