It takes a lot of effort to design a website that is visible on the internet and is beneficial to your business. This is especially true if you are not Google or a major player in your industry.
Gone are the days of “brochure websites”.
It is now necessary to construct a website that will not only garner attention from potential visitors, but will also contain psychological and marketing triggers that will convert them into customers.
If you want your business website to succeed, you need to do more than just make it look good. With so much competition online, you need to take steps to make sure your website stands out from the rest.
Your website needs to be both practical and attractive.
Websites today are able to generate leads 24/7 without any input from the user.
Sounds too good to be true?
I don’t think so.
There is no doubt that your website is the most important marketing tool for your business.
I work for an inbound marketing agency, and I believe that websites are very effective for generating leads and supporting businesses around the world.
What would be better than improving the effectiveness of this text by ten times?
They serve over 70,000 customers in more than 100 countries. For example, HubSpot is a world leader in marketing software and CRM. They have over 70,000 customers in more than 100 countries.
The website has hundreds of blog articles, calls to action and free content offers.
When inbound marketing tactics are used in combination with a solid website, that website can achieve a high ranking. In this case, the website is ranked number 5 in the marketing world.
1. Obtain a good domain name
Your domain name, also known as your website address, is important for making a good impression and for search engine optimization (SEO).
Here are some tips for coming up with an optimal domain name:
- Make it easy to spell. Try not to use slang, made up, or extremely esoteric words.
- Keep it as short as possible. The shorter it is, the easier it is to remember and type correctly.
- Use the proper domain extension. Try to always make it a .com domain name (as opposed to .net, .co, etc.) unless it is more appropriate to use another extension, such as .gov, .edu, or .org.
- Avoid numbers and hyphens. They are hard to remember and less elegant and memorable than word-only domain names, and may be misunderstood when vocalizing the domain name.
- Make the address broad to facilitate future growth. For example, Amazon.com is a much broader website address than BooksOnline.com and allows Amazon to sell pretty much every type of consumer good instead of books only, as was its original purpose.
- Ensure it is memorable. With so many websites on the internet, it is important that your website name is catchy so people will remember how to access it in the future.
- Research the domain name. Google it to see if a similar website address already exists online, and search on USPTO.gov to make sure it does not contain any registered trademarks.
- Check if the price is right. Determine if you can purchase your desired website address at a reasonable price since most good domain names are taken and will need to be bought from the current owner.
- Avoid nonsensical names. Choose a name that conveys a meaning so that users will know immediately what your business is. Yahoo and Google are catchy names, but they were very expensive to brand, and your small business may not have the same budget.
- Create an SEO-friendly URL. When appropriate, try to come up with an SEO-friendly website address that includes keywords and geo-location; for example, “www.LasVegasElectrician.com.”
2. Purchase secure, scalable website hosting with good tech support
A website host (or website hosting provider) is a company that offers the technology and services necessary for a website to be viewed on the internet. You associate your domain name with your hosting provider so visitors to your website address are shown your website that you store on your hosting account.
Here are some guidelines for choosing a good website hosting plan:
- Although you can get a “shared server” hosting plan for as little as $2 per month, I would typically advise against this. Shared hosting means you are sharing a server and its resources with other customers, which can make the performance of your site suffer. Also, if one of the other websites on your shared server is hacked, it is possible for your website to also be infected.
- A “dedicated server” hosting plan is the most expensive option—cost can range from around $100 to $2,000 per month—but it would make your website perform the most optimally. Having a dedicated server plan means that the physical server machine is entirely dedicated to your site; therefore, all the resources are yours and it is more secure than a shared hosting plan, as long as the technology is optimal. However, it is much more expensive than what most small businesses usually are willing to pay. Once you have a very high-performing site, this may be what you need, but it is overkill for most early stage and small businesses.
- The compromise I typically recommend is a “virtual private server” (VPS) hosting plan which offers the best of both worlds. The cost ranges from around $20 to $50 per month, which is affordable for the hosting services you will receive. A VPS is one machine that is partitioned to act as multiple machines, which gives it a similar affordability to shared hosting, with similar security and performance potential as a dedicated server hosting plan.
- Make sure your hosting company has phone and/or chat support so you can be helped quickly if you have a problem. Email support can often take too long and become frustrating when a problem needs to be resolved immediately. Phone support is best, but chatting works well, too.
- There needs to be an easy to use server interface like cPanel to access your server. You do not want to have to use terminal commands to view your server contents and make changes, unless you can afford to hire a professional server administrator to help you.
3) Check if Your Pages are Indexed
There’s nothing quite like having a website that looks amazing. It’s a great feeling.
To generate leads online, you need more than just beauty.
So start off by asking yourself this question:
“Is my website getting found on search engines?”
Your website will not be successful if people cannot find it through a search engine.
No indexed pages, means no website visitors.
If a website has no visitors, it has no online presence and all the effort put into making it is wasted.
But it’s not the end of the world!
You can confirm that your pages are being discovered by search engines through indexing.
Here’s how you can do a quick check up.
Simply go to Google and type:
site:yourwebsite.com
In order to improve your website ranking on google, you should include your website url in the following text: “I just read an interesting article on yourwebsite. It was really informative and well written.” In order to improve your website ranking on google, you should include your website url in the following text: “I just read an interesting article on [website name]. It was really informative and well written.”
4) Optimize Your Website’s Keywords
The position of your website in search engine rankings is determined by the keywords you use.
It is very difficult to be found on Google if the words “social media” and related keywords are not present on your website. This is especially true if your company provides social media marketing services.
Your potential customers are looking for your services online using specific keywords.
If you don’t use the right keywords in your content, your website will not be effective in generating leads.
The goal of this exercise is to get noticed by potential customers and interested individuals.
You should generate a list of keywords related to your company’s digital marketing courses, and use them throughout your website.
5. Choose a good e-commerce platform
Some platforms will enable you to sell digital products, while others will enable you to sell physical goods. If you want to sell goods or services on your website, you need the right technology to do so. (If you don’t currently sell anything, you might want to consider doing so, since e-commerce could potentially increase your profits.) If you want to let users make financial transactions with you online, you need to choose the platform that’s right for your business model. Some platforms let you sell digital products, while others let you sell physical goods.
Here are some popular small business e-commerce platforms:
Shopify is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows you to create and customize an online store. It is not a WordPress extension like WooCommerce—it is a standalone platform that is hosted on the Shopify server—so if you have a main website, your e-commerce site would technically be separate from that. You can link to your Shopify account from your regular website built with WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc., unless your main website has a Shopify integration plugin.
Some features of Shopify are that there is no limit to the number of products you can have, unlimited bandwidth, the ability to analyze fraud, discount codes, reports, and more. The main advantages of using Shopify are that you do not need a developer to create a store for you and that everything related to the back-end of the store is taken care of when you subscribe. A downside to Shopify is that you do not have as much control or flexibility over your store as you would if you used WooCommerce.
If you have simple e-commerce needs and chose to build your site using Squarespace, you can sign up for their e-commerce subscription option. This will charge you a transaction fee, but you can avoid this fee by upgrading your subscription to a basic online store. This option includes a free domain, SSL security, SEO, abandoned cart recovery, discounts, real-time carrier shipping, and more. However, some have said that it is not as user-friendly as Shopify. Additionally, it is not as flexible as WooCommerce.
Wix has a Shopify extension that is easy to use. You will need to upgrade your Wix account and subscribe to Shopify to use it.
GoDaddy Online Store is a new e-commerce platform that is easy to set up and use. You don’t need to be tech-savvy to launch your shop with GoDaddy Online Store. The templates are simple and clean, and you can customize them to some extent. The platform comes with marketing and SEO tools, social media integration, appointment booking, SSL security, fast page loading, and more.
6) Use Content Offers to Educate Visitors
If you want to improve your website’s design to better attract and engage customers, this hack is essential.
Content helps you collect leads by providing information on topics they are interested in.
Content offers help you move prospects through the stages of awareness, decision, and purchase.
The content you offer on your website should depend on what stage of the buyer’s journey your visitors are in. Offers can range from simple checklists and ebooks to webinars and case studies.
We also use content offers to collect leads and convert them into customers.
7. Optimize your small business website for search engines
Applying a set of practices to your website known as SEO will help to ensure that search engines index and rank your website in an appropriate manner. If your website’s content is good enough, it will be displayed to users who perform searches on the engine. Your website’s ranking on search engine result pages is determined by how well designed and written your site is.
SEO mainly includes the following practices:
- Keyword research and implementation
- Optimal website code
- Fast loading speed
- Being secure and having an SSL certificate installed; SSL is the standard security technology that ensures data passed between web servers and browsers remains private
- Having a mobile-friendly site
- Existence of high-quality backlinks (links on external websites with related content) that lead to your site
- Having lots of positive reviews online (Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc.)
- Using internal links throughout your site to keep people clicking and reading
- Using social media to link to your site (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
It is essential to continuously work on SEO in order to maintain a high ranking on search engine results pages, which will result in increased traffic to your website.
8. Regularly create and publish quality content
Having a lot of high-quality content as well as keeping that content up-to-date are both important factors for ranking well on search engines. Create a plan to regularly publish great articles or blog posts on your own site as well as on other websites that link back to yours. If you want people to keep coming back to your site, you need to make sure there is always fresh, relevant content for them to read.
Another great way to post high-quality content on your website is to ask for testimonials from your customers and then publish them on your site. This makes your small business more attractive and shows that you are constantly working to improve your site.
Use a tone in your content that is appropriate for your brand and that people will want to read.
9. Install webmaster tools
Make use of vital data to help you analyze traffic and site performance by installing Google Analytics and Google Search Console (both preferably via Google Tag Manager), and Bing Webmaster Tools. These tools can be used to track the following types of information:
- Daily, weekly, and monthly visitors to your site
- Number of views on each page of your site
- “Bounce rate”—the percentage of users who come to your site and leave after having only viewed one page (Google algorithms give higher rankings to websites that have a low bounce rate, on the theory that visitors are spending more time on the site and find it valuable.)
- Average time spent on site by visitors
- Crawl errors on your site (errors that the search engines found on your site in crawling its content)
- Broken links on the site
- Keywords that lead users to your site
- Backlinks to your site
- Web page download time
- Other information that can help you enhance your SEO
10. Implement a website maintenance plan
It is important to keep your website up-to-date and secure if you want it to be successful. Regular maintenance will help to ensure your site is safe from hackers and ranks well in search engines.
Here are some tips to create a small business website maintenance plan:
- Check Webmaster Tools data at least once a month and have any vital errors emailed to you in real time.
- Use traffic data to learn more about your audience so you can better cater to them.
- Use performance data to optimize and fix warnings and errors.
- Make sure all software is always up to date.
- Run security scans so you know your website is clean of malware and hasn’t been hacked.
Conclusion
Although it may be more complicated than you initially thought, creating a strong website for your small business is vital for success in the online marketplace. This article provides steps you can follow to ensure your business has a fighting chance.
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