Do You Make Money Online

New Small Business Website Guide

A Little Planning Goes A Long Way.

A common miss-conception among small business owners is that a website is some kind of company mascot. Often you will see small business websites that over concern themselves with the comany and not its products and services.

A small business website should be thought of firstly as a collection of adverts for the company’s products and service and then as a place where people can find information about the company itself.

Although the website is a collection of adverts, the way that people find those adverts is very different from that of traditional forms of advertising.

When you consider a newspaper advert, it is possible to estimate roughly how many people will see it. A newspaper would have a fairly specific circulation and will have sections that reflect various products and services. Given these facts it is possible to work out roughly how many people will visit each section. Each page will have a number of adverts on display and there is a good chance that yours will get seen.

The way people find a website is very different. It is necessary to construct your website to capture visitors who search for a term or terms that are specific to the company’s product or service. If you consider a kitchen company trying to get noticed online the most obvious search term or keyword would be kitchen. However if you consider just how many kitchen company’s there are on our planet it soon becomes apparent that you are going to be competing against millions of pages.

The vast majority of people searching on the internet will not move beyond the first page of the results. For this reason a website must be set up in such away that will allow you a very good chance of a front page position in the major search engine results. This sounds difficult, but is often a lot easier than you might imagine.

Using our kitchen company as an example, we need to think carefuly about what people would search for if they were looking for us. While many people might type kitchen, doing so will most likely return results that do not fit their needs at all. If a person is looking for a local kitchen supplier or fitter they are more likely to search for a less broad term. Many people would type a term and not a word. Let us assume our searcher lives in or near a town. They would most likely search for (kitchen MyTown or MyTown Kitchen). This would not only be a term that has less competition, but is highly specific to our company and customers needs.

Not all people will search for the same term and a search for (kitchen MyTown) will return a different set of results than for (Kitchen Fitter MyTown). By analysing the business it is possible to identify a number of search terms that people might search for if they were looking for a company like yours. By narrowing these terms down to a locality you are identifying a number of niche terms within your field. These niche terms carry far less competition and because of a lack of understanding among small business owners the competition is often very poor.

Once you have identified a number of possible search terms/keywords it is time to research the competition. Researching the chosen keywords enables you to work out how easy or difficult it will be to gain a front page position in the search results. Having this information enables you to put in place a foundation on which you can build a framework over time.

If the main keyword phrase for our company was (kitchen MyTown) we would start with the foundation which would be the domain name. A common mistake among companies large and small is choice of domain name. Choosing a domain name with the phrase (kitchen MyTown) in it should be your first choice. Using the company name as a domain name is most likely going to attract visitors who are already aware of your existence. These people would have been likely to buy from you anyway. Because a company name is usually quite unique in itself, it should be possible to build a page that is optimised to that keyword anyway.

Using a locality as a niche can work very well if your company is localised. but if you want to sell your product or service to a larger audience the job becomes a bit harder. For a national company using (UK or USA……..) can be possible, but you are likely to be competing with large companies. An alternitive approach is to build a number of smaller websites to cover different regions. The possibility of finding niches within your products and services is also an option, but your final decision should be made as a result of your research.

Researching potential keywords is made simple thank’s to a number of tools and services that are avilable,  many of which are free. You should be prepared to invest several hours to keyword research even if you find several quite quickly. Finding a broad range of keywords will give you flexibility and you need to pull traffic from as many different avenues as you can.

Some examples for our kitchen company.

If we assume our kitchen website has the domain name MyTownKitchens.co.uk/, then each page would be an extension of that with the page name preceding the forward slash.

So we may add and optimise pages that reflect other things that people search for.

Search = MyTown Kitchen fitter.   example   www.MyTownKitchens.co.uk/kitchenfitter.

Search = MyTown Kitchen Worktops.  example   www.MyTownKitchens.co.uk/worktops.

Once this basic foundation is in place the page titles, descriptions, keywords and content can be built around each page. Good content on your website will influence how it is seen by the search engine spider software. When a search engine receives an instruction it has to work out the order of importance the pages and It does this surprisingly well.

Understanding how the search engines tick makes it possible to construct your pages to ensure that they are seen as highly relevant to a given term. This can be built on further by making your pages popular with other relevant websites, but this another subject and will be the subject of my next post.

Planning a small business website prior to even buying a domain is a crucial process if you want your small business website to be successful. The vast majority of small business websites fail to come close to realising their full potential. This is almost always due to lack of understanding and poor planning.

Having a website built by a professional is always a good idea, but for most smaller businesses it might not be cost effective. It is possible to get a website built cheaply, but as with everything else, you get what you pay for. Buying a cheap website will usually turn out to be a waste of money. Cheap websites tend to be made quickly from a template. Usually little if any research and SEO would be carried out and text content is often minimal.

The fact that modern software make it so easy to build a website presents another problem. There are a vast number of web site designers that know less about SEO than you will by the time you finish reading.

If you are going to have a site built make sure that you know the difference between a designer and a developer. A developer is the one who you will think is trying to rip you off when in actual fact he is giving you good advice. A good web presence involves  ongoing development and therefore ongoing costs. Ownership of the website and domain name is another issue that must be considered. If you get your website built make sure you own the website and domain name.

Another thing that is nearly always overlooked is that a website can bring additional revenue to a business on its own. Affiliate and pay per click advertising can be added to your website to make passive income.

There are many programs online that offer extensive training on affiliate marketing, but care should be taken when considering a program. Fortunately your needs are going to be simple because the main focus of your website will be your business. Having said that many people make substancial incomes from Affiliate marketing and it can be a profitable addition to your business.

When advertising other product care should be taken to ensure that anything advertised is complimentary and not competitive to your business. Care should also be taken where place adverts on your sales pages if at all. This may take the customers focus away from a sale that you were about to close.

A good way to get rich content into a business website is to have a section offering tips or advice. This is a good place for your affiliate advertising and also shows the image of your companyas helpful and knowledgable.

For more on building a small business website check out the other posts in the small business website category at the top right of this page or for my video course click here.