Planning for Your Small Business Website
Planning Your Website – Step 1 -Determine Your Goals
You may have heard the phrase: “Failure to plan is planning to fail” This is true when starting your small business website. Before you can begin, you must figure out what your goals are so before you do anything else, ask yourself some questions.
What is the purpose of your website? Do you have a goal of immediate sales via shopping cart or is your goal to get your name out there and make people aware of your brand?
Planning Your Website – Step 2 -Who is Your Target Audience?
Another consideration when planning your small business website is determining your target audience. This will influence your overall design and layout as well as how much social media to use. For example if your target audience is seniors, you may incorporate less social media sites, and use larger fonts. But if you were designing for adolescents, you may have more social media and more audio and video content.
Planning Your Website – Step 3 -Study the Competition
Your goal should be to outperform your competitors so once you determine who your competition is you will need to get one step ahead of them. Of course this is hard to do unless you know what you are up against so it is important to study and research your competitors.
Enter a potential key phrase that is relative to your industry type it into the search engine. Your competition should be someone on the 1st page maybe the 4th or 6th entry. Now it is time to do your homework. How big is your competitor’s site? How old is their domain? What is their page rank?(There are tools available that provide page rank). Remember if you want to outrun the competition you will at least have to do what they are doing and more.
Planning Your Website – Step 4 -Key Word Research
After you know who your audience is and your competitors are you will need to decide what keywords and phrases you will be using. This means more than just coming up with a list of words related to your industry, but this is a good start. Take your list of potential search queries and find out if there are any seasonal trends with these words. Using online tools, determine search volume for your keywords as well as how competitive that phrase is. The perfect phrase would have a high search volume and low competition.
Planning Your Website – Step 5-Plan Your Design
Your goal should be to convert visitors into paying customers so not only is important to write good content, the design and placement of items is crucial. Remember to keep calls to action accessible so place social media and contact information visible.
For your overall look and feel, look at other websites for inspiration. There are thousands of templates available at themeforest.net. These templates are created by professional designers and they can be customized to represent your business.
Need help planning your small business Website
Russ Cuthrell is a Michigan SEO Expert and Internet Marketer with over 24 years of experience in the Information Technology space. He is the owner of Spyder Byte Media, Inc., a Michigan Website Design company located in Shelby Township, Michigan. He has helped hundreds small business owners in Michigan use make it to the top of the search engines and stay there.
