In this day and age, businesses cannot afford not to have a website in order to operate effectively. Regardless of what products or services you sell, there will be many customers who will only purchase from you after they have checked your website or blog. In many ways, having a website for your business is just as necessary as having a business card, because without either one you may not seem perfectly legitimate.
If you’ve never had to put together a business website before, it’s important that you know the fundamentals of what to do so you don’t walk into it blindly:
Cover the Basics
First and foremost, you’ll want your website to cover all of the basics such as the name and brand logo of your company, your contact information, an ‘about us’ page, directions to your retail location, and so on.
Communicate How You Can Help The Customer
The reason a person is visiting your website in the first place is because they are seeking a product or service they hope will fix a problem of theirs. Therefore, rather than use your website just to inform the customer of what kinds of products you sell, focus your attention on how your products will help or benefit them.
Optimize Your Website for SEO
If you want your website to have any chance of your website to rank high on search engines, you must run an effective SEO (search engine optimization) campaign. Use an SEO analyzer online that will generate reports for you telling you what components of your SEO campaign are strong and what components need to be fixed immediately.
Have Your Website Professionally Designed
If you’ve never set up a website before, it would probably be a good idea to pay to have a professional design it for you. This isn’t to knock on your web designing skills; it’s just to say that you want to have the most professionally looking website possible so that your business seems legitimate. If people don’t like how your website looks, they won’t stay around for long.
Tell Your Story
A great way to build trust with potential customers is to tell them your story. Talk about yourself and the passion you have for the products or services you tell, and why you want to use that passion to help people. While you can certainly do this in the ‘about us’ page, you’ll also want to tell bits and pieces of your story in other parts of the website such as the product descriptions and how those products came to be.
Use Calls to Action
Even if your website is professionally made, it may not be enough to make visitors stick around for long. Therefore, use calls to action to compel the visitor to do something, whether it be signing up for a newsletter or checking out a special deal you have going on.
Invite People to Visit Your Physical Location
Somewhere in your website, you will want to invite your web visitors to actually come see your business’ physical location. Display large and clear pictures of the inside and outside of your building, of your products on the shelves, and of your employees helping out customers.
Before you begin building the website for your business, imagine how you envision it looking when it’s finished. If you are able to form a clear image in your mind, your website will turn out exactly as you imagined it.
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