The importance of a good web address for your business cannot be overstated. A business website is often the first port of call for customers who are looking for information on your products or services. Having a professional looking web address helps establish your credibility and builds trust with potential customers.
While there are many reasons why you may want to set up a website, it is important to understand how people find your site in order to ensure that your efforts in this regard are both effective and efficient. Visibility online is ultimately the result of a combination of several factors including, but certainly not limited to, the following:
Traditional & Social Media Marketing
Many companies have realised the power of social media to promote their brands, products and services. The opportunity to engage with customers and potential customers on social media channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook is growing, as people look to these platforms first for information and then for products and services to purchase.
Traditional marketing, which includes billboards, radio and TV ads, are still effective ways to reach audiences, but social media marketing is becoming an integral part of many marketing strategies.
Traditional marketing channels are still effective avenues to reach audiences; however, social media marketing is becoming an integral part of many marketing strategies.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
If you’ve been putting off setting up a website because you think it’s too complex, SEO is the solution.
SEO is basically helping search engines, such as Google, to find your site when potential customers are searching for products and services related to your niche. Having a well-established and trusted brand name is important when applying SEO techniques; however, so is the structure and content of your site.
Your business website’s SEO will depend on a number of factors, including the language in which you answer questions, the platform you use to set up the site (i.e. is it mobile-friendly), structural elements such as the amount of text compared to images and the prominence of the keywords you choose.
Taking the time to build a good SEO strategy is essential if you want to improve your site’s visibility online. To get started, contact your business’s information officer or marketing manager and request a copy of their latest SEO strategy.
Content Curation
If you’ve been keeping up with modern trends, you’ll know that content curation is currently the ‘in’ thing, and for good reason.
Simply put, content curation is the process of collecting and presenting content that is relevant to your preferred audience. The best content curators combine their passion for a particular topic with expertise in digital marketing and marketing technology to create high-quality, authoritative content that can be trusted by their audience.
The simplest and perhaps the most effective way to ensure your content curation is both authoritative and of good quality is to hire a freelance writer or professional photographer to create content for your site. Having in-house content creators who have a direct connection to your audience and can provide input as to what is both interesting and relevant to your niche will also help enhance the quality of your content.
User Experience (UX)
Many companies achieve high customer satisfaction and retention rates by prioritising the needs and wants of their users.
The elements that make up the user experience are, in other words, the feelings, perceptions and behaviours that your target audience have when interacting with your business.
UX is all about creating an experience that is as close to a ‘5-star’ one as possible. To achieve this, it’s important to consider things such as how your customers/ visitors find your site, the information that they receive and how they navigate around your website.
Your website’s UX will depend on several factors including, but not limited to, the language in which you answer questions, the platform you use to set up the site (i.e. is it mobile-friendly), the type and size of the screen being used to view the site and the position of the visitor in relation to the Google Map.
Analysing your website’s traffic and analysing the behaviour of people who have visited your site are two crucial steps which will help you establish a sound UX strategy. Once you have, you can begin to prioritise tasks and aspects of the site that need improving.