No matter what is the size of your organization, a perfect website is an essential business tool for growth. Having a good-looking site is no longer enough – it needs to actively work for you by attracting new business and driving your company forward towards its goal to reach customers. Here we explain how to create a hard-working website in ten simple steps
Small businesses don’t have huge budgets to spend on their website, but the good news is that focusing on certain key principles when developing and managing your website will almost certainly yield a healthy return on investment.
Here are ten steps to ensure your website works for your business to take forward.
Table of Contents
1. Drive your business fast:
Remember your website is a curial business tool to grow, and whilst a good design is important, It should be business-led. Increasingly, current and potential customers engage with a company via their website, so think of it as your business showcase. Consistent branding and developing a defined identity starts with your website – and is then carried on through designing, marketing, brochures and other activities.
2. Review and retarget:
According to you your website is perfect! but like any practice or procedure it’s important to review it regularly to ensure that it still meets your customer’s needs. Does your site reflect todays trend in the marketplace? Does it still address your target market? Are the design, graphics and contents still relevant? Does it accurately showcase your business? If your website has been up and running for several years it’s difficult to remain objective, so it can be helpful to get an opinion from an outside source who can bring a new perspective to you.
3. Differentiation through design:
On the internet generally, people have such a short attention spans and they will quickly leave a site that doesn’t capture their attention – and that’s where great design comes in to rescue. Thanks to faster broadband speeds and improved software, website design has evolved hugely overtime. Graphics and images can now more compelling, and are a key part of establishing and reinforcing your branding and identity. Great design is also another way that you can really differentiate yourself from the competition, so make sure that your website looks attractive and professional, as well as being responsive and functional. Ultimately, this will help you to increase visitors, page view rates – and attract new business.
4. Work in progress:
Today in fast changing world your website should be continually developing. Unfortunately, many people tend to think of their website as a finished project, similar to sending a brochure to the printer, failing to take advantage of the fact that a website should be regularly updated by changing and adding relevant content. This can be done by writing blogs about your product or services, adding to news sections and creating links to and from your site.
This is important because clients, visitors and search engines are attracted by active and updated websites. If Google sees that content is being updated, it will visit your site more often, revising listings which is likely to improve Google’s page rankings. If you have relevant content on your site that features the most popular key search phrases on Google that refer to your specific products or services, geographical areas or a particular customer need.
5. Getting to the top:
Everybody turns to search engines to look for products or services online, so it’s crucial that your site available on top rank for them to pick. Smaller companies might think that only larger businesses can achieve page one of Google’s SERP, but actually any company can rank highly if they use the right techniques and put in the time and effort that is required to both get and stay there.
However, the process is complicated by the fact that search engines are constantly changing, which means that SEO needs to be working well on their website.Off-site optimization which involves linking to and from other sites also plays the crucial role with search engines, carrying out social media marketing and creating blogs and updated content to enhance your site’s overall online influence and reach.
6. Prioritize right:
Clear strategy for marketing your business plays very important role. Set short, medium and long-term goals but be aware that your website looks and feel is not enough to help achieve your goal. Only good-looking web design is not enough to attract your audience and rank high on google search ranking, which means that only optimization of the title and meta tags will be at a basic level and unlikely to generate the traffic that an active marketing strategy devised with an SEO/web marketing specialist will achieve, you need to have specialist who must know google algorithm well.
7. The impact of online marketing:
More and more companies see online marketing is the best opportunities to reach laser targeted customers through Search engine optimization which is free service if you know how it works or paid service like Google AdWords. The business has very little budget for marketing can also take the benefit of marketing through it more highly targeted than offline advertising. This means that people who are actively searching for your product or service will be directed towards your site – so you get more bang for your bucks on the internet than advertising in a magazine, newspapers or TV Channels.
8. New marketing methods:
Companies are taking the advantage of relatively new strategies for web marketing including Social media, YouTube, blogging and pay-per-click advertisement, some of which they may be uncomfortable or unfamiliar with. Whilst it would be great to do everything, financial and time constraints inevitably mean that you will have to choose the media and tactics that work best for your business.
9. Be mobile friendly:
The popularity of smartphones, tablets and laptops as a way of accessing the internet has risen rapidly and will only increase in the coming time – so it’s important to bear this in mind when setting up or reviewing a site. Having a mobile-ready website is increasingly important and a site that is easily accessible for mobile users is highly likely to increase sales and raise your profile, particularly if your business is primarily B to C. A mobile site should be built around the existing website, carrying through the brand identity. From a user point of view, it needs to capture the key elements of your main site, offering a point and click functionality that allows the user to access easily.
10. Create action taking customers:
You have done the hard part, creating an attractive, functional website that can be found and stands out from the competition, so make sure you take the final step and encourage the visitors to act. Include and highlight plenty of calls to action throughout your site. Adding a reminder to “phone us” or “email us” or “click here to buy” or “sign-up for update and newsletters” is simple – and amazingly effective.
Your website should always be a work in progress. As search engines continue to evolve, content and SEO need to be regularly revisited. Our experience has taught us that it is the sites that are proactively managed and updated that contribute most to business growth. The best web developers like InfoTechSphere.com will work in a partnership with the website owner to help them “make their website happen”, with constant review, dialogue and improvement.
The good news is that, no matter what your size, you can create a well-optimized, visible and effective website with a relatively limited budget if you follow these key principles.