Business Website Guide
Essential Tips For A Successful Small Business Website
For many SME’s, getting a business website online does not need to be rocket science. However, there are a few major pitfalls that should be avoided. These simple mistakes are so common, that around 80% of SME’s websites, have poor web presence.
The Key Ingredients Of Your Business Website
Investment Not Expense
Forget for a moment the website itself. Let’s first look at it’s purpose. If you are in business, what is the one thing that you want from your website? Hopefully you answered business. Ultimately, the whole purpose of your website is to bring new business. When you spend money on a website, it should be an investment, not an expense.
There are three questions that must be asked, when planning a business website.
- How will you ensure that the right people are able to find the website?
- How will you get their attention and make them stay?
- How will you get them to take action? (Enquire or buy).
Answer these three questions and you have the beginnings of a recipe for success.
Don’t Spend All Of Your Budget On Design.
Often you will hire a designer and before you know it, you have done your money just getting the website online. Going back to our questions, good design, will get your visitors attention. Great, but not if you have no visitors to get the attention of.
Do not pay to service your ego and do not be talked into paying to service your designers ego. Design is important but visitors are more so. If you have a limited budget, you should leave the door open for design improvements.
Essential SEO
Pretty Pages That Don't Get Found Are Worthless
It may not be what you want to here, but SEO (search engine optimisation) is essential. SEO will bring you regular, targeted visitors from free traffic sources. What’s more, it will often continue to do so, long after your initial investment. It is not the only way to bring visitors to your website but it is often the most cost effective and lasting.
Without visitors, your website is a waste of money and web space. Paid traffic is OK if you can make it cost effective but there are three questions to be answered and paid for traffic is no good if you are not getting your visitors attention or getting them to take action.
About now you should be starting to feel sick, because it’s all sounding complicated and expensive. This does not have to be the case at all and you will soon see why I am a passionate believer that SEO should be the main focus of a new business website project. First though, lets answer our third and final question.
Sales Copy
Now you are getting visitors, you need to turn them into paying customers. Notice that I left out keeping their attention. Design plays a big role in getting your visitors attention but it is a role that is shared with sales copy.
Keep Your Visitors Attention
A good headline, backed up with good sales copy, will grab and keep your visitors attention. Good design with a good headline will do an even better job of grabbing your visitors attention.
If you can’t afford to do both, do sales copy. That is once you have results from your SEO.
Think for a moment about some of the biggest and most popular websites. Google, the biggest and most visited website has a clean basic design. FaceBook, same again. Big retail websites like B&Q, and Argos online often have fairly simple, clean, easy to read and navigate designs.
Unlike many professionals, I believe that design is the least important of the key ingredients of a successful website. That is not to say that design is not extremely important, because it is. Ultimately you should strive to achieve a great design that grabs peoples attention and shows your business in a professional light.
It’s Just Common Sense
It Doessn't Have To Blow Your Mind
If you have the financial resources to invest in all of these areas, at the outset, you are very lucky. This is seldom the case and even if it is, you should not put all of your eggs in one basket. Developing a website takes time. Your investment should be made over time.
Not only does this take the sting out of the initial outlay, done correctly the website will start to pay for its own development and increase your businesses productivity. By concentrating your efforts on first getting well targeted visitors to the website, it is inevitable that you will make at least some sales. More importantly it installs confidence.
If you know that you are getting visitors but you are generating few sales, you know what needs to be done. You will be far more confident about hiring a sales copy writer, if you know that you already have the visitor numbers.
Investing in good copy, will increase the sales. Your website is now on its way and hopefully generating some regular business. Now is the time to worry about design, or at least that’s my opinion. It’s not an opinion that everyone shares but it’s fair to say that a designer is likely to place a higher value on design.
When it’s laid out in front of you, when you ask yourself the three simple questions that I laid out earlier in this article, I think it’s just common sense. Getting people to your website and getting at least some of them to take action, is more important than your design.
Design and sales copy can be tweaked and changed but both are useless without visitors. It really is as simple as that. Targeted traffic is the lifeblood of a business website and 80% of small business websites have little, if any.
I guess that it’s fair to say that for the average person who’s looking for a website, what it will look like, is close to the forefront of their mind. If that person was you, I really hope that I have persuaded you to think more about the websites purpose than what it will look like.
Your end goal should be to have a beautifully designed website. Your first goal should be to have an asset for your business. As long as you know that you want to improve or change the design later, your designer can construct your website to make it easily possible.
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Steve
Really liked your content, not only for people how want to use your services, but for people that want seo information as well, Congrats.
Marcelo recently posted..Saldão cheio de Games!
Thank’s Marcelo
The idea of setting up my blog this way was to raise awareness and provide some useful but non technical information about SEO for small business owners.
Building a successful online business doesn’t have to be very complex.
As you’ve pointed out, the process is relatively simple and the key is keeping it real and sticking to the plan.
It’s definitely more than great design or fancy bells and whistles.
Ultimately, if we deliver great content with our audience in mind, take care of basic SEO and get high quality backlinks from relevant sites, we’re well on our way to increased visibility on the web.
Great stuff. Thanks!
Sean@Buy Website Traffic recently posted..Off Page SEO Search Engine Optimization Secrets
Hi Sean.
That’s a very valid point, worth mentioning. Creating ood content is definately a great way to build natural backlinks to your site. It also help to build a foundation of regular readers.
Thank’s for sharing your thoughts and ideas.