When creating your 1st small business website, there are three essential things you should ask yourself:

1. Who is your audience?
2. How will your target market find you?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it’s amazing how many businesses don’t bother…and then complain that “our web site doesn’t bring us any business”.

1) Who is your target audience?

Provide a great deal of thought to your target market. Who do you wish to draw in to your web site? Why? The answer to that is a lot more than just “to sell them something”.

Claiming that your market is everybody is way too vague, and your web site will lack focus, and fail to maximize its potential. Ideally you should  be aiming to form a niche.

2) How will they find you?

Creating a distinct segment can conjointly facilitate you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site.

Think about what keywords your target market may type into a search engine to find you. Do the searches yourself. Who comes up within the top 10? That is where you want to be. Are your competitors there? Take a look at their sites. Do they work? How will you improve on them? Determine something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

Those keywords, or key phrases to be more accurate, want to be incorporated into your pages of your site in the page titles, headings, and in the interior link structure.

Be specific with your key phrases. They can be less competitive than a lot of general single word searches, and will target your market. You’ll need to localize or specialize to get in that top ten spot. The top 10 is where you will drive the most traffic to your site.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages. That’s pages on external websites that link to pages on your site. It’s critical  that this link building ought to be a natural growth where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should to be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the identical keywords, especially within the linking text. Search engines rank pages based mostly upon their reputation – your ranking will be determined by what other (ideally high ranking) pages say regarding your page.

3) How can you change your guests into sales?

Do not just tell them what you are doing or sell. Tell them why they need it (yes, need- not want). Provide incentives, freebies, discounts – something to get that dialogue started.

Current studies indicates that the human brain makes a judgment regarding a web page among a twentieth of a second! That doesn’t leave you terribly long to form an impression. So, make sure that you have got your Unique Selling Point (USP) clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on every one among your different pages.

Then create section that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you’re completely different from the rest, and why they should buy from you and not your competitors. And as we have discovered, they need to understand this instantly.

Lastly, be sure that your site contains a funnel-like structure. Determine your necessary pages, sometimes the “call to action” or purchase pages, and make certain all pages lead through that funnel. Your internal links – like their external equivalents – should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don’t name your product page “Product”, call it “blue widgets”, and be sure that the links pointing at this page also say “blue widgets”. This can help the search engines establish and rank the most important pages in your web site, it will also lead your visitor to that page and can assist with conversions.

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!