Marketing your website
Once our part of the work is done and your website is created, your part of the task is only just beginning. After all, there's no point in having a website if nobody knows about it. Here are some suggestions which will drive extra traffic to you, and make your website work for you.Advertising
There are many places where you can pay to advertise your website. We recommend Yell - the online version of Yellow Pages. A priority advert with a link to your website costs from £200 a year, which is quite good value when you consider how many people turn to Yellow Pages - and they claim that your advert is four times more likely to be viewed than a regular listing without a website link.Up My Street also has a directory of services called "Find My Nearest" which is based on the Thompson directory. The site gives details of how to register for a free listing, or pay to upgrade.
Google Adwords is an interesting way to market your website, but it needs frequent attention in the early days, so it's more appropriate for people who are often online. You pay a registration fee of £5, then set your own budget by choosing which search keywords you would like to trigger your advert, and then setting your daily maximum spend. You will need to tune it as you realise which phrases are giving you more clicks, and which of those turn into good leads, but after a while it should be possible to leave it running unattended.
Local interest sites may be appropriate, for example if your business is regional (such as a pub or shop) and you would like to encourage more local custom. In this case, look for sites about your neighbourhood, or neighbourhood circulars by local groups. If there is nothing local to you, perhaps your local council website will carry listings of businesses in an appropriate section.
If you work for a particular trade, there are often websites with which you can register to be listed - these may be Guilds or simply a directory of businesses. To see whether this is a good use of your budget, search for your type of business in a popular search engine like Google, and see if the trade site comes up in the first page of search results. For example when we searched for plumbers we found this plumbers business directory - so it's a good bet that customers needing plumbers would find this site too.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This relates to improving your position in searches on Google and other search engines.At Web Design & Mastery we only use traditional, honest methods to achieve good search engine placement, looking at the long term rather than a quick boost. We believe it is more important to get appropriate and well targetted traffic than large numbers of hits from people who will not buy your services.
There are various ways to improve search engine placement. The first one falls to us: to ensure that the website uses valid, appropriate code, and that it is fully accessible to all user groups.
The reason for this is that Google will expect certain HTML code tags to be used for specific purposes and will weight the content accordingly, so it's crucial that these tags are used correctly. As for accessibility - well, if the website is designed to be accessible to all, this will make it easier for Google's robots to retrieve the content from your website. After all, Google is just a text-only browser!
If Web Design & Mastery created your website then you can be sure that these features are already in place. If not, then we can provide a free, no-obligation quote for improving these aspects of your website. Just get in touch, or have a look at the maintenance section, which deals with overhauling your site to check for Search Engine Optimisation.
Anyway, with our job done, it falls to you to help with the search engine placement of your website:
- Impregnate your site with the right key words
- Have useful content on your site
- Keep your site updated
- Get respected and popular sites to link to you
Firstly, impregnating your site with key words is done when we create the website. You will be asked for ten to twenty words or short phrases that you would like people to use when finding your site in a search engine. We can provide examples of these, but ultimately nobody knows your business as well as you do, so it's best if you can think of the key words yourself.
Secondly, have useful content on your site! If there is nothing to see, the site will not get ranked highly. If there is content but it is not unique (i.e. there are hundreds of sites with the same text) you cannot expect to rank higher than the other similar sites. Try to find something unique and interesting that you can add to your website which will attract traffic, and perhaps after reading it, people will buy your services. For example if you are a restaurant, why not add an unusual recipe, or a description of how to fold napkins or decorate a dining room? If you are a tradesman, why not add a "Doctor's Surgery" where you describe the common complaints and how to take care of your house or garden from day to day? Adding "tricks of the trade" or "tips" will not only drive extra traffic to your website, but it will be relevant visitors who could well become customers. So, take the time to write some extra, unique and interesting content.
Keep your site updated! If your site is published once, then left alone, it will slowly fall down the rankings as Google perceives that it has been left to rot. This can easily be counteracted with regular updates - why not combine this with the concept of providing useful content by adding regular "top tips" or newsletters? This will also keep your customers returning to your website to see what's new, and at the very least this will keep your name in their mind - at best it will encourage them to buy from you when they wouldn't otherwise. It's easy to keep your site updated, just see our maintenance section.
Finally, ask people to link to you. Swap links with sites that can be useful to you (for example if you are a painter and decorator you could link to a good builders company, they in return could link back to you) and email your contacts asking if they will place a link on their website. Google will increase your page ranking if you have a link from other pages that it rates highly.
Remember that it can take a couple of months after submitting the site to a search engine, before you start seeing fruit from it. We typically find with Google it can take a month before they trawl the site, and another month before your site is indexed and appearing in the search results. Unfortunately you will have to be patient, but once the search engines have indexed your site, any changes to your content should be picked up more quickly. For that reason, if you are not able to provide all the content at one time, we suggest that a basic site goes online as soon as possible, with further pages to follow when you are ready.
If, at any point after your site goes live, you feel you are not getting enough traffic, please get in touch - we can provide a free consultation and some ideas on how we could improve your site's popularity and value.
Other ideas
Tell all your customers about your website and list it on all your stationery - from adverts to business cards - so clients can quickly and easily get more information. It could mean that they choose you above anyone else - because they can see examples of your work and find the facts they need straight away. When you give someone your business card, give them two - "one for you and one for anyone who might be interested" - then when the second card reaches someone they can come straight to your website to learn more.If you use email or newsgroups, don't forget to mention your website address in your signature. As long as it's under 4 lines long, nobody minds what your signature says, so you should use the space as a free advert!
"We are really delighted with our new website. Flash was extremely fast, friendly and helpful all the way through the process and went to great lengths to get the website just as we wanted. As complete novices to the world of website design, we were grateful to have a person who made the task run so smoothly.
Thank you very much!"
[Hackney Family Backup]
[Hackney Family Backup]
"Thank you so much for all your hard work on my behalf; you very quickly grasped the image I wanted to portray. I am really pleased with the website that was delivered earlier than I expected and on budget. Your extensive knowledge of websites and the legislation that affects them is impressive and led to a level of detail that I was not expecting. I literally could not have done it without you. It has been a real pleasure working with Web Design & Mastery."
[Kate Fishpool Associates]
[Kate Fishpool Associates]