I know from experience however that many small business websites fail to reach their potential – so if you are thinking of launching a brand new website or revamping your old one follow these 4 steps and avoid their mistakes.

RESEARCH your audience
Who will use your website? Is it for the general public or business people, and if business people, who exactly in a company will visit and why?

What will the visitor hope to find on your website? Will they be looking for prices, product specifications (size, functionality etc) or will they be looking for reassurance, which will come from the information you make available on your site, the client testimonials and examples of work you have done.

Decide what RESULTS you want
What do you want from your website? It might be direct sales if you are a retailer or enquiries if you offer a service. You might want your website to help you reduce costs in some way – for example to replace expensive printed brochures or to help as part of the sales process.

Unless you clearly define what results you want and establish how you are going to measure whether you are achieving them you could waste a lot of money.

REVIEW your keywords
OK – so I’ve introduced a little bit of jargon here. A ‘keyword’ is a word of phrase that your potential customers might type into Google or another search engine to look for whatever it is you sell. So if you sell furniture you need to look into what exactly people are searching for on the internet. ‘Furniture’ is a very broad term and experience tells that most people will be much more specific, for example searching for ‘oak dining table and six chairs’, knowing that if they search for ‘furniture’ Google will return millions of results (285 million in actual fact when I did the search a moment ago, compared to 2 million for the more specific search term).

You can use the Google keyword tool to help you find out what some of the most common search terms are, and also how competitive they are (ie how many other people are using those terms).

Once you have your list of keywords that will also help you to write the copy for your website. It’s essential to write copy that’s keyword rich – for both search engine purposes but also so the user can see quickly that they have landed on a relevant website. Using your keywords in page titles and sub-headings all helps to make sure when visitors land on your site they stay there.

Select the RIGHT supplier
If you want a functioning website that will get a high volume of visitors and achieve the results you want chances are you will need some professional help. Finding the right website developer is a bit of an art – but if you consider all aspects of the website you can’t really go wrong.

Look for web designers who can address the following:

• Appropriate graphic design – it should be attractive and create the right impression of your business but not get in the way of the user (or the search engines). 
• Structure and build – the technical aspects of how the site is structured so that it is easy to update, easily found and indexed by the search engines and doesn’t use any ‘black hat’ tactics to fool the search engines. Ideally you need a website that you can update yourself, via a simple content management system. 
• Copy and content – a good web developer should at the very least be able to advise on how to structure your content and should also be able to explain to you the importance of keywords and how search engines work. They may also be able to write the content for you too. 
• Reporting – make sure you will have access to reports which show the number of unique visitors to your website as well as things like how many pages they view and how long they spend on the site, which are your top landing pages and so on. Without this information you won’t be able to make intelligent decisions about your website in the future.

If you are investing a large amount (£5,000 or more) in a website it is worth considering professional copywriting as well as specialist help with search engine optimisation.

Further reading:

Website checklist

10 ways to improve your website

This article first appeared in Practical Marketing, the free monthly e-bulletin of Second Opinion Marketing, in May 2009.

Article written by Teresa Harris of Second Opinion Marketing. Teresa is an independent marketing consultant working with professional practices, small businesses and public sector bodies to develop effective marketing plans which achieve their business objectives.

As a marketing coach Teresa works with new marketing managers and small business owners to enhance their marketing performance.

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