Many business owners understand the importance of having an Internet presence through their own website. What they often struggle with is what content to put on their website. I’ll share some website tips with you build a site that is designed for today’s marketplace.
Why are people visiting your site?
Most businesses set their site up to be a digital version of their company brochure. People are actually visiting your website for one or more of these three reasons:
- To solve a problem
- To be entertained
- To fill a need
Be mindful of this when you are developing content for your site because people don’t necessarily want to read your ‘brochure’, they want to learn how you can help them fill their need or solve their problem(s). Design and write your site so you are doing more teaching than selling. This unexpectedly, will help you sell more.
What are keywords?
Keywords are the critical words and phrases that people type into their search engine to find the content they’re seeking. Doing proper keyword research before you write the content for your site is a fabulous idea because once you learn what people are searching for by doing some market research, you will have a better understanding of how to help them and write content that meets their needs. Make sure that you’re considering keyword options that are outside of the lingo that you use in your industry by brainstorming layman’s terms.
If your business is an indoor play park for kids and don’t realize that parents are typically typing in indoor playground, you’ve missed a lot of business opportunities. Doing proper keyword research ahead of time allows you to get found for keywords that actually be sought out online.
Should I Blog?
Your website is your number one salesperson. Most people think that all of your website visitors will come through your home page. In fact, through the creation of a blog, you can attract more traffic, and they actually start visiting your site on one of your sub-pages or blog articles.
By creating a blog, you are putting out nuggets of information to the Internet and allowing people who are looking for answers to those questions to find you. Once they read your article about how you can help them, they are more inclined to connect with you because you are showing them your expertise in the field.
The content that you post on social media is not your own. Think about how your business would be impacted if Facebook or Twitter disappeared tomorrow. Putting good content on your own website is best and posting links to it on your social media accounts is what’s recommended.
For further suggestions, follow this link that will help you create captivating content on your blog.
How many pages should my site be?
Your website should have at least 10 pages to be considered as a good source of information by the search engines.
How many words per page?
It is ideal to have at least 250 words per page to provide enough content to be crawled and indexed by the search engines.
Here is an additional article on what content to put on your home page.
Should I put links to social media on my site?
Yes, I would recommend inserting links to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, etc in the footer of your website. Be mindful that you want visitors to stay on your site, engage in its great content and become customers, so don’t encourage them to leave the site and connect with you on social media.
How do I optimize my website?
Making your website search engine friendly is important in matching you up with potential customers that are seeking what you have to offer online. One way that search engines do this is through reading the meta tags on your site. You may need assistance with updating them, but it’s worth your time and effort.
Each page has a meta title, meta description and meta keywords. Here are my recommendations for each one:
Meta Title:
- Needs to be different on each page
- Up to 60 characters in length (including spaces)
- Use your highly searched keywords here
Meta Description:
- The search engines will sometimes display this content or a snippit of content on the web page
- Write this content to be catchy and encourage people to visit your site to learn more
- Don’t worry about the keywords as much here, just focus on enticing the reader
- You can write up to 60 characters for the description
Meta Keywords:
- It has been many years since Google has used the meta keywords
- You can leave this section blank
The images are also fabulous opportunities for you to get found. Many people will do image searches online and if they find your image, thanks for your smart keyword research, this is another website visitor that you may not have otherwise encountered.
Each image should have its own customized alt text and title text that utilize keywords from your keyword research.
Outreach is also required in order to give your website a boost. I’d recommend seeking out ways to get other websites to link back to you. You may have colleagues who can do this for you, directories or businesses that are similar, but non-competing. Another form of outreach is to request customer reviews on Google, Yelp, Facebook, etc as a way to help give your website more authority and exposure.
Transforming your website into a hub of information and resources is one of the best things you can do to grow your business. By shifting your focus from selling to helping your customers will help take your business to the next level. If you need a hand with your keyword research, creating a website that allows you to post your own blogs or optimizing your website, feel free to connect with Tammy Martin for a website consultation to learn more.
Not ready for a consultation? That’s okay too. Here is another helpful article that provides you with what content to put on your home page.
