Having a business web site in today’s world is paramount but just having any old web site put up on the internet is a receipe for instant failure when it comes to attracting new customers for your products or services.
Does your current web site meet with today’s requirements by consumers? In an ever changing world, your customers will be looking for information and they want it quick.
What a Business Web Site Should have
Having your details on your business web site home page is a MUST but you’ll be surprised by the number of web sites we see that do not have the basic information:-
- Business contact telephone number in an easy to find area
- Call to action/contact form for customers to get hold of you via email
- Your business address and location map
- Business Opening Hours
- Easy navigation menu to view your products and services
Ideally, your business web site should have your corporate identity logo prominently displayed in the header of your site. If you current don’t have a logo then its a great idea to start with this process and logo design is readily available on the internet. We can point you in the right direction if required.
You will also need to know how many pages your business web site will require. Will you need a new page for each individual product or service that you sell?
How will customers find these products/services?
What keywords will you want to target to get traffic to your web site?
Once you have thought about all the content required to go on your business web site, the easiest way to start with is to lay this template out on paper first, creating a mock-up up what your site will look like.
When you are satisfied that the web site layout is as required the next step is to either create your own web site or have a design company like Somerset Web Consultancy create a themed web site for your business.
Either way, we would advise to use a content management system like WordPress so that once the web site is complete it’s a simple matter of adding new content as and when required. If you can use Microsoft Word or similar, then you’ll soon adapt to using WordPress.
Your business web site theme can be a simple 4-6 page site or be indepth with 100′s of pages to include all your products and services you provide to customers.
There’s nothing stopping you adding additional pages as and when required, nothing is set in stone. Got a new product range in – no problem, create a new menu and add your products.
Promoting Your Business Web Site
Now that you have a web site, you’ll need to start marketing your brand new business web site wherever possible. Add your web site address to all your stationery – letterheads, business cards, brochures, advertising and even outside on your business signage to get as much exposure as possible.
Every business should make sure that they have a Google Places Listing. It is a FREE listing from Google that enables you to have more business exposure on the world wide web. However, just claiming your listing isn’t much use. You MUST optimise your Google Places Listing to maximise the chances of a top spot on the first page of Google within the Listing section. As ‘local search’ is becoming more predominant in the search engines, Google places huge emphasis on these listings and on most occasions these listings appear before any organic search results.
Somerset Web Consultancy specialise in optimising Google Places Listings and provide this service. We will only work with ONE business category in any one town/city, so for example, if you’re a car dealer in Salisbury, we would not do any other Google Places Listing optimisation for other car dealers within the Salisbury area.
If you have a web site, its now imperative that an optimised Google Places Listing works alongside your business web site to maximise the visibility of your products and services within your local area and gain new customers resulting in greater profit margins.