Pick a theme and image that honestly reflects your business #creativecase
We understand that before undertaking a website project that there are many key points to consider and this is why we build websites correctly from the start. Top 6 Tips to study before starting your website whether it’s a new website or the rejuvenation of an old website.
Gear your website towards your audience.
To start with you need to know who your clients and prospects are and you need to look at gearing the content on your site with their perspectives in mind and your site will succeed. Decide on a purpose for this audience and what is “in it for them”. Is your goal to generate sales, or to position your company as an authority in a field? If you plan to use other content marketing like e-mail, social media or offline media concurrently with your site – note this at the planning phase.
Pick a theme and image that honestly reflects your business.
People are suffering from information overload, so find an enticing image that reflects your company. Start planning ways to continue the use of multimedia in your content. Clever infographics and visually pleasing photos and video will highlight your business and its offering.
90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text.(Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco)
Viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
Research your competition
Research your competitors by simply viewing their online offering and working out what you can do better. With both your competition and your target market in mind, create a keyword strategy. Think of words or phrases that get to the core of what your products or services are about. Choose less competitive keywords more appropriate to your business (long-tail keywords). Use Google keyword planner to help you in your plans as this gives a good idea of what words and phrases rank highly in the search engines.
Create valuable content for your sake and Google’s love.
Chose the right content writer and get the right decision makers involved so that your content reflects the true “voice” of your brand or business. This checklist is designed for digital content creators and marketing teams, and it defines valuable content using five benchmarks:
- Findable
- Readable
- Understandable
- Actionable
- Shareable
Google has a very strong opinion about how bad websites with low-quality content are for their search product and the user. If a user makes a search query and a low-quality website is returned, this constitutes a poor user experience. Panda is Google’s reaction to fighting spam and stopping it from ranking high in their search results. Spammers will continue to toy and trifle with Google when it comes to search engine ranking, and neither side will ever slow down. So create quality content and Google will show you the love.
The whole is greater than the sum of all parts.
Although with the modern CMS systems you can ultimately have control over the updating and maintenance of your site inhouse, by using an integrated marketing service your management becomes more measured and effective across the marketing landscape. It is easier to control the variety of disciplines and how they overlap and are increasingly inter-reliant. It’s this integrated approach which is needed in order to truly develop an organisation’s voice. Planning and scheduling content and maintenance is especially crucial for keeping your content fresh and up to date. Pick your team well as you will rely on them heavily, especially when it comes to the scalability of your website and the journey your business will embark on. Make sure your site is built with growth in mind.
Make sure you and your team understand SEO best practice and the strength of social media
If you follow some of the simple guidelines outlined above your website will rise in search rankings. Additionally, encouraging your clients or community partners to link to your site from their sites is seen by the search engines as quality link building or “link love” and will help increase your rank. The use of the social media big 5 – Twitter, Facebook, YouTube , LinkedIn and Pinterest has become one of the most valuable SEO tools to date. More of this in later posts.
These are my Top 6 Tips to study before starting your website. What do you believe should be added to my list?
Lisa Leathes
leathes.lisa@gmail.com
lisa@creativeimagineering.com