Small business owners is your website delivering?
One of the most popular questions I receive from clients is that their website isn’t delivering the results that they need. Either they got some bad advice, or the website content management system they were advised to use doesn’t have the functionality they need, like the right international payment services for a business selling clothing online. Or they don’t rank well in the Google searches because their SEO isn’t great. Here are some steps you can take before creating a website that will help your business grow and build brand awareness.
- Decide if you have the skills, knowledge and more importantly time to build your own website. If not, then do your research and discover a digital marketing agency who has the expertise in this arena and can build a cost-effective website that is going to help you deliver results, but also has the right functionality to meet your customers’ needs too.
- You might decide to get a digital marketing agency like Redheaddigital.com.au to build your website, but then once it’s been built, to keep the costs down you may want to look after it yourself. This is quite simple to do today as the systems that are available are quite easy to use, but once again this comes down to time, should you be updating your website when you could be chasing up leads received through your website?
- Make sure you go with the right website content management system – there are so many out there today. Before making the decision know what you need from your website in terms of functionality for your business. If you need a universal payment service and Google Analytics reporting and it doesn’t have these options, then it’s not going to be the right option for you. WordPress.com is one of the more popular choices, that has been tried and tested.
- Make sure you choose the right domain name for your website as this can make it easier for your customers to find you. Ensure it’s unique and easy to recall, don’t put numbers or hyphens in your domain name.
- Web hosting – many people forget this part, your domain name is like your home address, but then your web hosting is where your website lives – like your house. And with all houses you usually have to pay some money to rent or own it, similarly you will pay a fee to host your website so that people can find you. Once again many website content management systems like com provide this as part of their package. Or you can go it alone, here are some of Australia’s top web hosting companies.
- Check out what your competitors’ website looks like, what can you offer on your website that will make you stand out from them?
- When working with a digital marketing company make sure they can write good content too. You might have a great looking website, but without engaging content you aren’t going to get found by customers through search engines like Google. You’ll need to do some research in this space to understand what kind of content your potential customers would be looking for.
- Use great images on your website, they bring it to life and also help with search engine optimisation (SEO) – make sure your images are tagged with descriptive, keyword-rich file names. Image file names alert Google and other search engine crawlers as to the subject matter of the image.
- Review your Google Analytics and make changes based on what your customers are doing on your website, to optimise and get the best results from your website.
- Write blogs on your website, they are a fast and easy way to create content specifically designed to fill SEO gaps.
For more website tips book a free one-hour consultation with one of Perth’s top digital marketing agencies.