We hope this second part of the tips for a great website provides you with some great new ideas. These are ideas that may as well be top secret if you don’t presently know or apply them. Unfortunately, no matter how good you think you are as a business person, you can’t guarantee regular new customers coming to you. You have to market your practice. Some businesses do this through building referral networks and others from direct marketing activities such as adverts, mailshots, telemarketing, seminars, etc. The great thing about a properly constructed website is that it can be used in conjunction with whatever type of marketing you do. Even if the extent of your marketing is just giving someone your business card, with your web address and the right message on your card, you can drive traffic to your site.
Tip 16 – Allow customers to contact you in different ways, online forms, phone, email, skype, text. Offering a FREE report with an online contact form for customers will help. Perhaps they visit your website in the evening when they can’t call you. They may then fill in the online form, whereas if there wasn’t one, they may forget to call you the next day. Alternatively, a request a call back form is very useful. Adding a value to your free services or report such as saying it is worth a monetary value can help show that it’s of real value.
Tip 17 – Use an Online Quote Form. Have a facility for potential customers to gain a quote or guide price through your website. You can collect all the information you need online to provide a quote. This doesn’t have to be final and can then be firmed up when you meet the customer. Doing this makes it easy for customerss to get quotes and should lead to you receiving far more quote enquiries and subsequently gaining far more clients.
Tip 18 – Describe Your Services. Describe your services in some detail. Don’t just list them. If you were describing your services in a meeting, you’d give more detail, so do the same. It’s important to sell the benefits of each service. And make it easy for the prospect to go further and request more information on each service. The search engines will give you 10 times more traffic if you describe your service and perhaps giving a photo gallery related to that service than just listing it.
Tip 19 – Give People a Reason to Come Back. To keep people coming back to your site you need to give them a reason to come back. An example of what you can use to do this may be an up to date news section.
Tip 20 – Advertise Your Staff Vacancies Have an area where you can advertise employment vacancies. This allows you to cut your advertising costs by referring the advert to the website for the full job description. A full description will also help to cut out unsuitable applicants. It also encourages immediate applications through CV’s being emailed to you – important if you urgently want someone.
Tip 21 – Have a Client Area where you can put information that you only want clients to access. Clients will also wonder what’s in there and want to get in! Everyone wants to get in the VIP area don’t they?
Tip 22 – Use Web Audio, Perhaps put it on your home page but it can be an annoyance if it plays automatically, so just offer the option to your visitor to play it. A great sounding piece of audio will completely differentiate you from the other businesses around. Unless, you have a great audio voice, it’s probably best to get it done professionally. Adding some music in the background will really give it some panache.
Tip 23 – Map and Directions To your workshop, shop or office will save you loads of time in sending out details and explaining how to find you.
Tip 24 – Use Viral Marketing Tools. Try to have a viral marketing tool that can help spread your company name around. For example, something like a iphone or android phone application or one of the flash games that you can add a link to in an email. Who can resist finding out how long it will take for them to get a high score or telling their friends about it. A Tell a Friend link can remind people to do this.
Tip 25 – Keep the Content Fresh and Updated. So that visitors are encouraged to return to see what’s new, a blog is a great tool for this.
Tip 26 – Have an Easy to Use Navigation System So that the visitor never gets lost. A site search function is also important to help with this. Navigation ‘breadcrumbs are great for website visitors and the search engines.
Tip 27 – Follow Up website enquries and if they dont reply to your answer or quote then ask if it was received
Tip 28 – Make Your Contact Details / Phone Numbers Prominent. Wherever the visitor in your site is, make sure your phone number is displayed clearly so they don’t have to hunt for it. Often quite large at the top of every page will be good. Use of a Land line / Mobile and Freephone number could encourage more enquiries and ensure you don’t miss a call.
Tip 30 – Online Chat – If you are office based and / or can have an employee inf ront of a PC all day then use Online Chat plugins on your website that could give potential clients and customers as many potential ways as possible to communicate with you as everyone has different preferences. Online chat is becoming very popular and can help with credibility as well. Again, it’s likely to differentiate you from other businesses.
Tip 31 – Optimise Your Site for Search Engines. Called SEO or search engine optimisation. Increasingly, potential clients are starting to use search engines to find a business they need. Typically they are searching for businesses in specific geographic areas, often your local town. You need to identify the most popular keywords that local searchers are using and optimise your site for them.
The search engine optimisation process is generally concerned with
1 On Page Optimisation. This is the actual construction of your web pages – content (text) and its relationship with page titles, headings, meta keywords, meta descriptions, keyword density, keyword position, HTML and CSS compliant pages, page load speeds, page size, url names, link titles, etc.
2 Off Page Optimisation. These are factors beyond your website content that will affect the importance of your website within the search engines. For example, a key factor is the number and relevancy
of links from other sites to your own. A one way link from another related site or directory to your site with a good Google Pagerank will help your own site. You need to ensure these are links the search robots can follow which isn’t the case in many directories. If you have great content and lots of optimisation you may over time rise in the rankings for some of your key search terms. You really need to aim to be on the first page of search results, ideally in the top 3 for your key search phrases.
Tip 32 – Use Pay Per Click. Most search engines also use a Pay Per Click service. The most popular one and the one to focus on is Google Adwords as the Google search engine is by far the most popular with searchers in the UK
Google Adwords is the adverts that appear at the right and at the top of Google search pages, alongside the organic search results. You then pay for each click on your advert that takes them to your website. Let us assume you were paying £1 per click. That means if you get 20 visitors to your website the total cost is £20.With any half decent website, it’s likely at least one of those visitors will sign up with you. With a good website, a lot more! So the cost for a new client is £20, at an average fee of let us say £500, gives a cost per new client of 4%. Pay Per Click is a science all of its own and having as SEO / SEM expert do it for you is usually a sound investment. Some searchers use the Pay Per Click search results a lot more than the organic results. By being on the first page for both you maximize your chances of clicks to your site as well as page 1 results increasing your businesses credibility. The great thing about Pay Per Click is that within minutes of setting up your account you can be on the first page of Google whereas search engine optimisation is a process that takes a many months if not years to achieve.
Tip 33 – Subscribe to Forums. Registering in relevant forums will allow you to communicate directly with lots of potential clients. They aren’t for direct advertising but if you offer helpful advice you can often leave your website address in your signature for readers to then visit your website. The extra links to your website can also help with search engine optimisation.
Tip 34 – Promote Your Website Everywhere Promote your website on all your promotional material be it your email signature, brochure, letterhead, adverts, business card, van, signs on your office building, etc.
Tip 35 – Advertise the Launch of Your New Website. Make a big splash about it. Write and email to your clients, prospects and referral sources to let them know why they should visit.
Tip 36 – Headings Grab Attention. Use headings that will grab attention. They are often the most important aspect of drawing in your prospects to read what you’ve got to say.
If you want to grow your business you need to take action and get things moving. Delicious Webdesign can make you a great website or make your website better, call us today.
