3 Steps To Your First Small Business Website

When planning your first website small business, there are three key questions you should ask:

1. Who is your target audience?
2. How will you find your target audience?
3. How will you convert your visitors into sales?

These questions sound obvious, but it is amazing how many people do not bother … and then complain that “our web site gives us no business.”

1) Who is your target audience?

Make a good deal of thought to your target market. Who want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is most likely to sell something – a product, service, or idea, maybe.

Claiming that your market is everyone and everyone is too vague, and its website the lack of focus, and not to maximize its potential. Ideally you should be the goal of creating a niche.

2) How are you?

Create a niche also helps search engines and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider the keywords your target market would type in a search engine to find you. In fact, do the same searches. That comes in the top 30? Because that’s where you need to be. If your competitors? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

These keywords – or key phrases to be precise – should be incorporated into the pages of your website – in the titles of pages, lines, and internal links.
Be specific with your keywords. Be less competitive than the general search for individual words, and more precisely the target market. You may need to locate or to specialize to get into the top 30 – and 30 is the place to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware of their own experience, if you have not found what you’re looking at top 3 results pages, look elsewhere.

The key to high rankings on search engines is to build inbound links to their web pages – pages that are external websites that link to pages on your site. Basically this acquisition link should be a natural growth – in number of inbound links increases at a gradual pace. The following pages link to yours must be relevant, on the subject and ideally contain the same keywords – especially in the link text. Search engines rank pages based on their reputation – the ranking will be determined by what other (preferably senior) pages say about the page.

3) How to convert users into sales?

Do not just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why you want (yes, I – not required). Offer incentives, gifts, discounts – anything to get that dialogue started.

Current research indicates that the human brain emits a trial on a website within one twentieth of a second! That does not leave you much time to make an impression. Therefore, make sure you have your unique selling point (USP), clearly visible on your homepage – and preferably prominent in each of its other pages. After all, it is a fact that the homepage is the first page a visitor sees, especially if you have found through a search engine.

Then make sure your list of safeguards noted bullets. Visitors must understand why they are different from the rest, and why are facing you and not your competitors. And as we discovered, have to understand this almost instantly.

Finally, make sure your site has a funnel-shaped structure. Identify your important pages – usually the “call to action” or purchase pages – and make sure that all roads leading to those pages. Internal links – and their foreign equivalents – should describe the destination page. If you sell blue widgets, do not call your product page “products” they call “blue widgets” and make sure that the links that point to this page, also say “blue widgets.” This not only helps search engines to identify and rank the most important pages of the site, but also lead visitors to all important conversion.