Creating a SME Website (Part One)
In the today’s business environment the Internet has become an extremely powerful business tool. At a minimum it can be used to generate plenty of juicy new sales leads or at its full potential delivering a full e-commerce sales vehicle and revenue stream.
Unfortunately this been said it still tends to be the very large business groups or industry specific groups such as the hospitality sector that use the Internet to anywhere near its full potential.
Using the Internet for your companies’ business advantage need not be either a complicated or costly measure. I believe armed with a little knowledge you can start to develop your company’s web presence so that it will quickly become an important part of your business strategy and ultimately deliver plenty of new sales and customers.
Your Website
Your website is your both your company’s shop front and product showroom on the web. Therefore it’s critical that you put in some work beforehand and plan for its design, wording and creation so that it delivers your company, people and products in their best light. Start by asking yourself questions.
What do you want to achieve from this process?
Can your on line presence add to your bottom line?
Goals
Once someone visits your site they become a potential customer so the primary goal of a business website needs to be to guide and encourage the visitor to make a positive next step such as giving contact details (leads), picking up the phone to call (leads) or making a decision to purchase on line (sales). Don’t forget a web designer’s business is the look and feel of the site not what your customers will want so you are the one that is best placed to manage the process.
About
Keeping your primary goal in mind your site is also a source of information to your potential customers. In other words, it’s like a sophisticated on-line brochure providing potential buyers with relevant information about the company, its people, products and existing customers. What is a potential customer likely to want to know about your business to help them to buy your product?
Text
The text needs to contain a decent sprinkling of the key words (search terms) that your potential customer is going to type into the search bar when searching for your product. In this way it’s very different to a standard hard copy brochure and that why it’s never a good idea to just replicate existing hard copy text on line. This bit requires some research beforehand from you. You may feel you have a good idea of what people are lightly to be searching for but you also need to consider and research less obvious keywords and search terms. Not doing this is lightly to be cutting off large numbers of potential visitors and ultimately customers. Include all these keywords in the text of the site and where possible in the text of your home page. It is also worth considering that search engines love new information so where you can stay away from coping or replicating existing on line content.
Pictures and Bios
It’s a good idea to include pictures and bios of the main people within the company. This allows you to demonstrate to the potential buyer the levels of experience within the organisation and show off any relevant qualifications and achievements.
Graphics
Buck the latest trends and keep graphics to a minimum. While they can look good they sometimes create more trouble than they are worth. Heavy graphic dependent type-sites are extremely difficult to get a good ranking on Google or the other search engines due to the nature of how websites are indexed. Remember Information rich sites rather than flashy sites usually win the ranking battle within the search engines.
E-content
Newsletters, blogs and free advice are a great way of keeping your potential customers on the site while also giving you an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise in your chosen field. The process of having a visitor sign up for a newsletter also provides you with sales leads.
Links
You also need to create a links page in your site. This is to allow you to add relevant links to other sites within your site. You include this page so that you can start to exchange links with other sites and build up the back links to your site.
Posted by Niall
Tags: SEO Ireland, small business website, SME websites, web design ireland