The goal of your business website should be to generate buzz about your product, service, or brand. This buzz should lead to traffic visiting your site. This traffic should turn into leads and finally paying customers. After doing a significant amount of research, I have put together key considerations and components you should keep in mind when considering a web presence for your business.
Traffic to Paying Customers
To turn visitors into paying customers, they must first know about you, begin to like you, and finally, trust you enough to do business with. Know, Like, Trust. This means you need to create content, explain your services, and provide a way for people to connect with you.
In Andy Crestodina’s book, Content Chemistry: The Illustrated Handbook for Content Marketing*, he recommends guiding potential customers down a virtual path. It first begins by putting quality content in front of them. You do this through blog posts. The blog posts should help your potential customers solve their problems. By doing this, they begin to know you.
From your blog posts, ideally, you will guide your potential customers to your service pages. Your service pages should explain what you do. What makes your business unique?
Next, potential customers should be guided to your about page. Your about page should explain why you do what you do. This entire combination should help develop leads who know, like, and trust you enough to do business with.
Finally, you want to make it easy for your potential customers to connect with you. This would be your contact page. Crestodina recommends that you create a contact page with fields that need to be filled in rather than simply placing an email address on your page. Other than a spam magnet, email addresses cannot be analyzed in Google Analytics. Google Analytics is your eyes to how people navigate through your site.
Business Website Key Components
When people are looking for solutions, a majority of them search the web. If you have a robust web presence, there is a great chance you can be found. Increasing the amount of content you have on the web, increases your chance to be found. In Rich Brooks’ book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing*, he equates this to electromagnetism. The more times you wrap a wire around a nail, the stronger the magnet becomes. The same works for the web. The more quality content you put on your business website, the more attraction you create. Here are ways you can increase that attraction:
Own Your Domain
First of all, you should have a website for your business. If you do not have a business website, you significantly reduce your chances of being found in an online search.
If you do get a website, ensure that you own the domain name and are hosting the site rather than hosting with wix.com, wordpress.com, or another company that lets you create business websites.
Likewise, you should also be the administrator for the sites. It is great to have a web designer build the site for you, but you should be the owner of the domain and be the administrator to the web hosting platform. I have had bad experiences in the past with web designers who would not allow me to access my own site.
Link It to Google Analytics
Once you have your business website up and going, you will want to ensure it is collecting data with Google Analytics. Google Analytics can let you know how visitors are moving through your site. It will help you identify where you can make improvements and what is working well.
Again, it is important that as a business owner are the administrator of the Google Analytics site. You would regret it if an employee or web designer walked away with access to your data. You cannot replicate this data.
Naturally, you can provide access to employees or external parties to help keep an eye on your data.
Blog Posts
Your blog should be a central piece of your business website. This is where you should regularly share content to help your audience and potential customers. Both Brooks and Crestodina stress that you should be creating quality content to help solve problems. The content should be to inform or educate. Do not use it for the hard sell. Instead, use the content to help people to get to know, like, and trust you.
As Carol Tice says,
“A great business blog doesn’t sell. Instead, it shows customers why they should do business with you and not your competitors.”
The key to successful blogging is to regularly post quality content that helps solve problems. Additionally, you should include a call to action on each of your blog posts.
Service Pages
Your service pages are where you get to tell what you do to help customers. Try to answer as many of your customers’ questions as possible. Ideally, you should have a separate service page for each of your services. This will help you determine which services are resonating with your potential customers. With Google Analytics, you will be able to watch how people move through your site.
Service pages are also great places to place your testimonials. Crestodina recommends sprinkling your testimonials throughout your site, especially on high traffic pages. Do not create a separate testimonial page.
About Page
Your about page is where you share information about you and your team. People want to get to know who they may be potentially working with. It is where you get to talk about why you have your business and what you are hoping to do for others.
The about page is also a place where you can share testimonials, awards, and press highlighting why someone should work with you.
Contact Page
The contact page is perhaps one of the most important pages on your site. This will typically be one of the first times you can interact with a lead. You want to keep the barriers low and make it as easy as possible for someone to contact you.
Your contact page actually consists of two pages: a page with the contact form and a thank you page. You want to ensure you are setting separate pages because you can then see how people are navigating through your site.
Final Thoughts
Naturally, there is a lot more to developing a business website… a lot more. However, this should provide you with some key components to consider when building or remodeling your website.
As I do audits for customers, I keep these important tips in mind. You want to create a site that is helping people to get to know, like, and trust you. You tend to work with companies that you trust.
Take a moment to review your website, if you have one. Does your site logically move your visitors through the site so that they have an opportunity to get to know, like, and trust you? If you need assistance to improve your site, please contact me, I would be happy to offer recommendations.
* In the spirit of full disclosure, this is an affiliate link, which means that if you purchase this item through my link I will earn a commission. You will not pay more when buying a product through my link. I only recommend products & systems that I use and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.
Plus, when you order through my link, it helps me to continue to offer you lots of free stuff. 🙂 Thank you, in advance for your support!
