If you still unsure whether a business website is necessary or not, I suggest you to read my previous article about the importance of establishing a web presence for your business to be competitive – Just to give you insights and help you to make the right decision.
For those of you who have already figured out the importance of web presence for your business, congratulations! 59 percent of your competitors are one step behind you (please refer to the above article I mentioned.)
However, competing with the rest 41 percent is no walk in a park. Many of those small businesses know how to get their business website exposed to their target market. But take heed, some are simply have no idea how to promote their website the right way.
Here’s what I have been learning all this time doing business online – Something that you have to focus all of your website promotion efforts to: Content/design, traffic generation and traffic conversion.
Here are the brief explanations for each.
Content/design
Content is important, but I allow me to stress the importance: If your content is low quality, so will your business branding be. Your business website is where your prospects will learn about your credibility, integrity and reliability. Invest well in content, and it will take care of your business well – Consider hiring professional content writer, as the stake is high.
Design-wise, just like in other marketing materials, compelling layout and graphics help prospects portray your business better. Again, consider hiring web designer or developer to help you present your content the right way.
Traffic Generation
“Just build it and they will come” is not relevant in website promotion. Excellent content and design don’t generate traffic on their own. You need to get the words out – to both prospects and search engines.
Traffic generation issues are complex and it probably need 50 pages of explanation, but here’s the essence: You need to get your website to the first page of search engine result pages (SERPs). SERPs are those pages that are displayed after you type a term on your Google, Yahoo! or other search engine’s search form. As you might already knew, the first page is the most important part of the Internet real estate. SEO and link building processes are needed to help you achieve that.
Getting into the top 10 results are trivial. In my opinion, you need to mix-and-match with other strategies, such as social bookmarking/social media posting, forum posting, blog comment posting, and many more. You can learn more about them from the search engines or you can consult with the right SEO and link building specialists.
Traffic Conversion
Content and traffic generation are kings, but traffic conversion is the king of kings. Traffic conversion is essentially turning traffic of prospects into product or service buyers.
Here’s a simple math: Getting 10,000 visitors to your website with 1 percent conversion rate will generate 100 sales. However, getting 1,000 visitors with 10 percent conversion rate will generate the same 100 sales. The 9,000-visitor difference is suddenly not that important anymore :)
Just like in retail stores, passer-bys and window shoppers are not necessarily interested in buying your products or services. They could help you with buzz, but conversion is where the income lies.
You have to optimise your business website layout to seek which one converts well. Some strategies, such as A/B testing, can be deployed to maximise your business website’s conversion.
All in all, this is a broad topic to explore; We will cover on this more on future blog posts – A Noobpreneur.com ebook in business website promotion in the future, perhaps? ;)
Ivan Widjaya
Business website promotion
Image by Danard Vincente.