Online Marketing Services Reading

Every sizable business today has a website, whether you are a firm of solicitors, a furniture store, a management consultant or a plumber’s merchants.

Customers demand easier access and more information than ever before and want to be able to learn about our services while we are tucked up in bed. So a website is a great tool which can save you money as well as earn you some.

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 t...