When planning your first small business website, there are
three essential questions you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will your target audience find you?
3. 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?

Give 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
maximize 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
localize or specialize 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.

Till the next post….

The Designer

Tagged with: General • small business website design

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 12:25 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.