|
Article by: Ben Neale
When planning your first small business website,
there are three essential questions you should ask yourself:
Who is your target audience?
How will your target audience find you?
How will you convert your visitors into sales?
These questions sound obvious, but it's amazing how many people
don't bother...and then moan that "our website doesn't bring
us any business".
1) Who is your target audience?
If you are planning a website
for your small business should be giving a great deal of thought
to your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website?
Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something
- a product, a service, or an idea perhaps.
Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague,
and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximise its potential.
Ideally you should be aiming to create a niche.
2) How will they find you?
Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines,
and drive hot leads to your site.
Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search
engine to find you. Actually do the searches yourself. Who comes
up in the top 30? Because that's where you need to be. Are your
competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can
you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business
that sets it apart from the rest.
Those keywords - or keyphrases to be more accurate - need to
be incorporated into your pages of your site - in the page titles,
in the headings, and in the internal links. Be specific with your
keyphrases. They will be less competitive than the more general
single word searches, and will more accurately target your market.
You may have to localise or specialise to get in that top 30 -
and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your
site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if
you haven't found what you are looking for in the first 3 results
pages, you look elsewhere.
The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building
inbound links to your web pages - that is pages on external websites
that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition
should be a natural growth - where inbound link count increases
at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant,
on- topic and ideally contain the same keywords - especially in
the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation
- your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high
ranking) pages say about your page.
3) How will you convert your visitors into sales?
Don't just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they
want it (yes, want - not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts
- anything to get that dialogue started.
Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment
about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn't
leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that
you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your
home page - and preferably prominent on every one of your other
pages. After all, it's not a given that the home page will be
the first page that the visitor sees, particularly if they have
found you via a search engine.
Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees.
Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest,
and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. And
as we've discovered, they have to understand this pretty much
instantly.
Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure.
Identify your important pages - usually the "call to action"
or purchase pages - and make sure all roads lead to those pages.
Your internal links - like their external equivalents - should
describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don't call
your products page "Products", call it "blue widgets",
and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say "blue
widgets". This will not only help the search engines identify
and rank the most important pages in your site, it will also lead
your visitor to that all important conversion.
For more information on this visit WebLaunch-
Small Business Website.
Ben Neale The Marvellous Media Company web-
design.multimedia-production-services.co.uk
Join my free newsletter
and receive "Adsense Revenue Exposed", a $37 value,
ABSOLUTELY FREE! This free offer will not be available for
long, so don't delay! Your name and email address will never
be sold or given away and you can unsubscribe at any time.
|
