Your Small Venture Web site
A website is a crucial ingredient of your marketing strategy because it can certainly widen your target market to include anyone who has access to a pc and the online. Almost 60% of Canadians had access to the internet at home in 2003, and around 8 million had regular access to the internet from somewhere, either in your house, at work or at school.
And that’s just in Canada. Ecommerce sales from Canada were $7.2 billion, and we only captured 4% of the global ecommerce market! So, how could you reach some of those internet surfers, and how can you capture some of that $7.2 billion spent in ecommerce?
1st, you grow it
The first step is designing your web site. If your company already has venture cards and letterhead, it’s best to design your internet site around them. A matching corporate identity and internet site helps with branding.
I like uncomplicated websites, with a simple layout and not difficult navigation. A decent, simple layout, with good graphics, balanced look and good color combinations is my #1 goal when designing a small enterprise web page. Remember to use graphics sparingly and to optimize them for your internet site because internet surfers are impatient. If your page loads too slowly, they’ll leave.
Navigation needs to be not difficult to find and to use, and it must be consistent from page to page. I’ve left far more than one site aggravated because I couldn’t easily find their navigation.
Small enterprise web sites aren’t static. They evolve. You need to start somewhere, and starting with an introductory web page is most likely easiest. All you really need to start is five pages. You might always add pages later. The important thing is to just do it-take the plunge and get it out there.
Your five pages could include an index, or home page, about us, services, contact and a sitemap. The index page is your landing page. Generally its design is a little more detailed versus others, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
I like to use CSS (cascading style sheets) for designing because it’s simply easier to create a website and to edit its layout with CSS rather than just HTML (hypertext markup language) alone. A change on a CSS sheet changes all of the pages on your internet site at once.
Content is king
Once your website is designed, you’ll want to begin thinking about content. Design is very important, but it does little good to have a beautiful site without high-quality content.
Your small enterprise home page introduces you and your company-who you are and what you do. The about us page is usually used to give a lot more detail than the home page about who you are, and your services page gives far more detail about what you do. You might wonder why you’d “waste” a page on a sitemap since you only have 5 pages, but sitemaps help search engines find all the pages in your internet site.
As far as content goes, far more is better, up to a point. Your pages needs to be content rich and informative, but they also need to be relevant to your small venture. If your visitor can’t figure out what your site is about in only a few seconds, they may leave.
The web was at first strictly informational, and that’s how it remains currently. Several times folks have tried experiments using copywriting similar to direct mail sales letters, but they’ve all failed. It looks as if people surf the web much more for information than anything else. Knowing this will help you compose pages individuals will want to read.
Attracting visitors
You could follow your instinct and just start writing, but wait. There’s research you have to do first, or your web site simply won’t be high enough in searches to be found. Internet search engine optimization is far too big a subject to cover in this short content, but among other things, search engines find your pages based on keywords.
So, pretend for a moment that you’re alternatively side of the desk. If you were a customer of your own business, what words or phrases would you use to search for your product or service? Ask friends and neighbors how they’d search for your product or services.
When you’ve come up with a few, check them out on a keyword suggestions tool. You can also use that tool to suggest similar words and phrases. Then find out how many results there would be should you searched for that term. What you dream about to do next is narrow down your choices to the words or phrases that are searched for the most, but have the fewest results.
Remember that folks usually really do not look beyond the 1st three pages for almost any search term, so if you’re not in the top three pages, your business seriously isn’t likely to be found at all. If there are actually millions of results for your phrase, you might simply need to make it much more distinct.
For example, let’s say you do have a small enterprise consulting company that specializes in communication for small business. Using “communication” as a search term is nearly pointless because there are actually almost 2 billion results for that word. But, there are only 974 results for “small business communication”.
Much better, but the frequency of which is that searched for? According to WordTracker, it’s searched for 10 times a day. Not poor, but I think we can do better. How about “small enterprise consulting”? That’s searched for 261 times a day, and you will find 373,000 results. That could be the most effective primary phrase for a small venture conversation consulting business.
What you want to do, is write your content around those words and phrases. You really do not want or need very many-three or four are plenty.
Getting them to come back again and again
Getting visitors to come back to your website again and again is fairly simple. Keep your content fresh and lively, make sure it’s informative, and add to it often.
I desire you decide your small business really needs a web page. It’s the very best way I know easy methods to reach a wider target viewers with a relatively small investment.
The author is a local SEO Services expert and founder of a New Jersey online marketing company. Visit his blog for more small business tips.
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