For any business whether offline or online the point of having a website is to build awareness around your brand and to generate more sales. How do you help people to find your local business website, and how do you make it stand out from your competitors?
You need a search marketing strategy. You need to do the simple things right, then go above and beyond what your competitor’s are doing with their sites.
Make Your Page Content Great
When you create your new business website or update your existing one, take some time to think about the main pages of your site. What will you put there? What words will people be using to find it? When someone visits that pages, does it provide them with all the information they need to make a decision and then provide them with the details to get in contact with you?
This content should be the foundation of your website. It what everything else – your social media, advertising, you blog etc – will be built off. It’s where you’ll direct customers, other business owners and generally curious relatives to find out more about your business. This content should be something you are proud of. Without this foundation, everything else around your search marketing strategy will crumble.
Once you have your foundation you should work on other ways of drawing in traffic to your site.
Get Creative with Your Blog Posts
Have you ever typed something into a search engine like ‘When should I service my air conditioner?’, or come across something in your social media feed that says ‘Top tips to help you care for your garden’. These are longtail keywords and the chances are these articles have come from a website’s blog.
No matter what industry you are in when you start a new business website you should include a blog section. You don’t have to post daily, or even weekly. If you post just once a month that’s better than nothing. Because a blog is an opportunity to connect with your audience (potential customers) without them feeling as though they are being actively sold to. You can interact with those who visit you blog and help to cement your brand into their minds when thinking of your industry. Blogs also provide you with something to share through your social media channels.
A blog can also help your website rank within search engine results, without dealing with a lot of technical background website information. That’s not to say that if you write a blog post your website will suddenly show in the number one search result, but a blog post can help show search engines that you know about your industry and factor that in when ranking your site.
Link Internally to Key Content
What do we mean when we talk about internal links?
These are links from one page of your site to others within it; this includes links that appear in your footer, navigation menu and links within written content – just like this one Local Online Marketing.
These internal links won’t only help visitors to find related articles within your site, but it will also make it easier for search engine bots to crawl through your site and find which content is similar, help to prove what your website is about, show what keywords it should rank for and generally make it easier to navigate.
These are the first steps to creating an outstanding new business website, check out our Local Online Marketing articles for related content or contact us if you need any assistance with your site.