Websites are now the most common way for businesses to reach potential customers. They’re also a great way to get people interested in learning more about your business, its products or services, and how to contact you. A website is an online presence for your business that can be found with search engines like Google and Yahoo! For many businesses, a website is also a virtual storefront where visitors can learn about products, see pictures of them, read company mission and bio information from company leadership, and even get some clues as to where they might be able to find the products locally. But creating a great website isn’t as easy as just putting up a few pages on your computer at home. To stand out among all the other sites out there vying for attention, you need to follow some specific steps:
Step 1: Know your target audience
At the heart of all marketing is the fact that you don’t want to be selling to just anyone; you want to be selling to people who will benefit from your products and services. The same is true for your website. While it’s true that everyone on the internet can see what’s on your site, you want to be sure to design your site with a specific audience in mind. How do you do that? By asking yourself a few questions. What industry do you operate in? What kinds of customers do you serve? What are their demographics? What are their pain points or problems they need solved? Finding your target audience is really critical to determining the content you include on your site. For example, if you operate a pet store and your customers are primarily senior citizens with pets that have health issues, then you need content on your site that reflects this. And you definitely don’t want to include information about your products that are designed for dogs who like to run and play, like frisbees and dog toys.
Step 2: Define your goals
Now that you know who your audience is, you need to think about what you want them to do on your site. What actions will you want them to take? Will you want them to make a purchase? Build their confidence in your products or services? Register for a webinar? Subscribe to your email newsletter? Your website’s goals will depend on your industry, products, and services and the type of customers you serve. But before you can create any type of content, you need to know what the overall goal of your site is.
Step 3: Write your site's content with SEO in mind
Though your content should be in line with your site’s goals, it’s also important to know that Google’s search engine algorithmic updates are changing what determines a site’s rank in their search engine results pages(SERPs). So you can’t just write your content for your customers; you also need to write it for the search engines—and that means writing it in a way that will help your site’s rankings. What does this mean? Well, it’s important to have a few keywords in your content that your customers might be looking for when they’re searching for a product or service like yours. But you can’t go over board with this. Your content has to be natural, and it has to be interesting enough for people to click through to your site and stay there. SEO experts recommend that websites have between 300 and 2,000 words of text on each page.
Step 4: Select a platform
The type of platform you select to build and host your website can have a huge impact on your site and its ultimate success. There are many different options you could choose from, including a website builder like Squarespace or Wix, a content management system (CMS) like WordPress, or a hosted solution like GoDaddy, which provides hosting for your website and some basic website design. While most of these platforms will allow you to create a great site, you should also keep in mind that certain platforms are designed more for ecommerce sites than for general content sites. If you’re building a site that’s mainly for product information, you might want to go the hosted ecommerce solution route. If you’re creating a site that’s more about information (including product information), you might want to go with a CMS.
Step 5: Publish your site and monitor it
After you’ve built your site, you have to publish it—and then stay on top of any changes you need to make over time. Among the most important things you have to do is keep an eye on your site’s position in the search engines. You can do this by using a monitoring tool like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools to track how often your site appears in search engine results. When building your site, be sure to include a contact page with your company’s contact info where people can easily get in touch with you. You may also want to add a social media share button to every page on your site so that people can easily share it on their preferred social media platform.
Conclusion
The internet offers businesses several advantages over traditional forms of marketing. However, creating a successful website requires a lot of work and planning. You can’t just throw up a few pages on your computer at home and expect to create a successful site. You need to follow specific steps to create a great site that will bring in customers and keep them coming back.