Can you imagine living in a house that wasn’t designed by an architect or better still have you ever walked into a house that has been properly designed and instantly you think boy I would love to live here?
The construction of your website is very much the same. It needs to be constructed with purpose and intent i.e. a shopping website would be designed completely different to a services website and needs to be able to grow with your business. If you want to capitalise on visitors who arrive at a website by clicking search results then your website architect also needs to employ some other key strategies and that is what this blog is all about!
Many people turn up at my doorstep after they’ve already had the website designed. They say I love the look of it but I don’t get much business from it and it’s nowhere to be found in the search engines. Most of the time I deconstruct the one page over designed website and salvage some of the images, graphics and all of the content and start over. Just because your website designer has listened to you carefully and delivered what you thought you needed, it doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you.
The thing that frustrates me the most about a lot a website development companies, is they design a website but they don’t construct it in a way that can make it organically found in search results and after you’ve spent thousands of dollars on the design. They then tell you that you need to spend $500-$1000 a month on paid advertising to promote their work and your website! A lot of the time they don’t even give you backend admin access to see web statistics and other cool stuff, this is needed so you can see who’s visiting your website if anyone!
I believe a one to five page website will never have any clout in the search engines. A website should be broken into as many pages as possible, every page should be a hook and baited, let me explain…
Architecture is simple, make every room or every page of your website should be it’s own country, well-balanced, optimise images, relevant content, a short domain and search engine friendly URLs. Imagine that you are a fisherman and the hook has just the right amount of bait on it to attract the right fish and when they bite you can catch them with one bite. When I first started fishing I quickly learnt I caught more fish with more hooks, don’t put all your bait on the homepage.
Let me give you an example of some of the things that I used to make a big difference and deliver results. I used to look after the marketing of 45 different rental car brands, some of the sites got a lot of traffic and I could play around with the layout and get different results. The most simplest one was adding a phone number and email address on the top of every page. A lot of people hate technology, as much as I wanted them to, they wouldn’t complete an online booking form!
My client thought “if the phone rang it came from the Yellow Pages” and “If they got an email it came from the website” I had to train my clients to track leads, when they answered the phone to ask the person how they found them, this was before Google analytics and Call-tracking software came around. It was to my clients surprise when most came from the website not the expensive Yellow Pages advertising. It still applies today people struggle with technology and prefer to phone.
“Market what you do NOT who you are” – Danny de Hek
People do not walk by your website and look in the window and go “this looks lovely I’m going to pop in and order a product or service”. It doesn’t matter how fancy your website looks, the search results all look the same. What they think of your Title, Description and URL can set you apart from others, they will click on it and land on one of your pages. If you have many pages you can attract many fish, this is why blogging is so effective and I will discuss this in future articles.
One of my travel websites has over 1000 blogs, that is 1000 hooks in the ocean all baited with different types of bait for different types of fish. Once upon a time my travel website was getting 25,000 IP visitors per day! This was back in the day the Tom, Dick, and Harry didn’t have a website of there own and I could easily intercept there traffic by passing of non marketed key phases or brand names.
Website marketing is complicated and it’s not as simple as it used to be when I started out back in 1994. However I have always been very aggressive and push it to the limit. If you want to succeed you need to use every trick in the book to be ahead of your competitors, you cannot afford to be passive. Your website should be a work in progress and you should be able to add pages and remove pages without being extorted by a website development company.
I would have built 500+ websites and would you believe, I have never launched a website or had coming soon or taken a website off-line to rebuild it. Make it go live from day 1 build it in realtime, don’t be in a super hurry to get your message on the screen, construct it properly with a good foundation. Search engines monitor your website and they look for websites that are updated regularly. Don’t let your website sit static.
Regular blogging and adding content will ensure you keep your website search engine friendly. Website development is not rocket science, nor should it cost the earth to have your own piece of the Internet for your online business premises.
P.S. If you like this article, please click “like” or provide comment, as that will motivate me to publish more. Share and inspire. Thank you.
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