Does your website go all out to sells your products?

Remember your website is a marketing tool and SEO is marketing for websites

Sell your products with good SEO from Colchester SEO EssexEven if you get lots of visitors to your site,  does it say what it should to attract customers to go that step further and contact you.   Remember, marketing is about getting customers to contact you, selling starts when they contact you.  You can’t sell to them if they don’t know you are there,  so your website marketing is very important.  SEO or Search Engine Optimisation should be a fundamental when it comes to marketing your website as it’s one of the most cost-effective ways to do it long-term, but you also need to remember that your website should sell to your visitors when they get to it.   Your website should be easy to find on Google but then once you have the customer there, does it sell your products? So, I am going to give you  the first two points of  a  checklist to think about when you look at your website to see whether you’ve got it right or not.

Get an SEO audit of your website

You need to be honest when assessing your own website and sometimes it’s a good idea to look a your competitions’ websites as well.  You might think they look better than yours but in terms of the basics, they might actually be worse.   I worked on a website that didn’t look particularly good but at its peak, it pulled in 7,000 visitors a month as it was incredibly well optimised and organised.  Saying that it may not have converted those visitors into customers so readily as it had been written in the days when it was common practice just to brag about yourself and in general tell your web visitors how wonderful you are.  Which brings me to No.1 on the checklist.

Sell benefits over features on your website

1. Is your website full of “we”.   If so you need to change this.  You are guilty of talking about yourself and talking at your customers, a bit like the boring person at a party who talks about nothing but themselves and how good they are at everything.   We all hate people like that and we switch off so why talk to visitors to your website (who are in fact potential customers) in the same vein.  Use “You” and speak directly to your customers and about your customers, not yourself.  Your website should give them the benefits of using you and tell them how you can help them.

2. Do you talk about what you offer throughout your website without a thought for how that translates for your customers.  If so you are selling features and not benefits.   Potential customers are not so much interested in what you offer as how it will work for them.  What will they get out of it?  So sell benefits not features.   If you product is different and that difference will give benefits for your customers sell those benefits not the features.

Look out for the next 2 points on the checklist coming up soon.

If you require further information on copywriting or SEO for your website contact sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk

How important is a website for a new business?

When you start-up a business you tend to have quite a few initial costs at a time when your income might be quite limited.  You want to get your name and your business out there but most small businesses would struggle to finance a marketing/advertising campaign when they first get going.   Also if you’ve started up in business and you have only a small amount of capital you don’t want to blow it all at once.

What’s the best website route to go down if any?

Nowadays there are dozens and dozens of options for creating websites and it doesn’t have to cost a SEO, Colchester, website design, Google ranking, website design and marketing for new small businesses, Essexfortune.  A lot of companies start out operating with just social media pages but I would advise getting your website set up as early as possible as it takes time to build ranking and traffic. When I started in business back in 2011, website’s were expensive. You generally had to invest a fair bit with a designer or have a lot of know how yourself.  Saying that, I set up my first website on WordPress myself and that’s a very viable option for most people today.  They have pay monthly options and will help you through most of it or you can do it yourself and keep costs to a minimum, usually just the cost of a theme.

It takes time for a website to get ranked on Google and start getting traffic

Your website doesn’t just get “out there” the minute it goes live sadly, that used to be the case in the early days of website, because there were fewer websites.  These days in most industry areas the competition is massive so you actually have to market it.  That’s really what SEO is, marketing your website.  Once of the most important criteria for a website to rank well with Google is longevity.  A long established website will do better than a new one generally, unless everything is thrown at a new website in terms of SEO etc, but even then it will have a period where Google will rank it poorly because it’s new.  So, the earlier you get your website going the better.

Monthly payment versus upfront payment for a website

It may seem the cheapest option to go for the monthly payments though a company who will design your site and create it for you.  Remember that this often includes only the most basic SEO if any, and they may not even create a site map, set up analytics and some other essentials.  But if you add up the monthly costs, which often include add-ons for emails, SEO and security, you could find yourself paying a massive amount more over five years, than you would have done getting a designer/developer to do it for you with everything you need.  So make sure you research costs well and don’t just think of it as a monthly payment but what it will cost you over two or three years and what you’d pay for a properly designed website on WordPress or a similar platform.  Often the latter works out much much cheaper and gives you more flexibility.  As you’ll have a website for a long time £25 a month over 10 years could work out quite expensive!

A website doesn’t have to be expensive

It doesn’t have to be expensive to set up a website and remember a website is always a work in progress.  Google works on the premise that a site should be constantly updated to stay up there in the rankings so you can start with something really quite basic and then keep improving it until it’s perfect.  This way you improve your ranking and keep Google looking your way at the same time.

Think SEO WHEN you build your website not AFTER!

Before you consider a website you should think very carefully about how you are going to set it up in terms of copy and keywords, title , meta and alt tags and of course who you are going to promote your products to.  This is what SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is all about.  It’s simply making your site visible to the search engines so customers can find you.  Most people create the website and think about this after, which is really missing a massive trick as nobody is going to find the website until the SEO is at least half decent.

Website designers rarely do the SEO for you, it’s not their field

Some designers when commissioned to create a website will take this into consideration and have a reasonable amount of knowledge about it, but don’t assume they all do when you commission someone to design a website for you. The amount of times I ask a client if they have had their site optimised and they say “Oh I’m sure the guy that designed it would have done that”.  A web designer is more often than not a web designer and only does the basics of SEO.   Some offer SEO as a subsidiary service or as part of the package but you do need to check whether you are getting this and not just assume that you are.    If it’s not included in the service then you need to consult an SEO expert preferably before you get your website designed and they can work in conjunction with your designer.

Would you print leaflets and expect them to deliver themselves

Setting up a website without a thought for SEO is a bit like printing a pile of leaflets and leaving them on your sideboard.  Nobody is really going to see your website any more than they will see your leaflets.

SEO and Internet Marketing at the Colchester SEO Company, Essex

You do have to market a website and SEO is the most effective way of marketing your website.

Even if you can’t afford an all singing and dancing beautifully designed website, you could create something yourself on a platform like WordPress (very SEO friendly and easy to use) and do a crash course on Yoast and learn the essentials for optimisation.  Then later when you’ve got a bit of money, you can get advice from a developer on improving the look/function and and SEO provider on how to make the most of the SEO. of course it’s a bit different if you’re looking at an Ecommerce site but that’s another story.

We work with a lot of small businesses who have done this and are very happy to polish up a website for small businesses and even to do it over a period of time so as to stagger the costs.

If you require further information on web design or SEO for new or existing business then please contact sue@theolchesterseocompany.co.uk.

Learn how to spot an SEO “tall story”

Are you bombarded with emails telling you your website isn’t working well for you?

Whatever your business, you’ve probably receive hundreds of emails telling you that your website is missing this or that and they can help get you to page 1 of Google.  I get them even on my SEO site, which rather makes me chuckle.

Are you baffled by SEO and worried about who to use to sort out your website?

If you’re a sole trader or small business on a limited budget and your baffled about all the talk about SEO but know your website isn’t bringing in the sort of enquiries it should, how do you know where to start?

I would always recommend that you read up on the subject and try to at least get to grips with the basics, so that you can tell when you’re being bamboozled.  There are loads of quite simple articles online and at least if you know even the basic terms and a little bit about how it works, there is less change of you being led down the garden path.

As in all industries there are people who will try and sell you something you don’t need, so be aware

Sad to say there are a lot of people out there professing to be experts in both SEO and all things to do with Social Media but you will only know that they are real experts if you can spot some of “exaggerated claims” that will come your way.

I was in charge of SEO for a sizeable firm with a large website for many years and often had great fun with the people who phoned up telling me that could get us to the top of page one on Google (we were already there for about sixty search terms).  I would ask them how and listen to them waffle on about how they had looked at our code and it needed cleaning up (already clean) and that our site didn’t have enough back links or the right meta keywords etc, etc and then I’d start asking them questions and see how long before they rang off.  Naughty I know but I got fed up with the assumption that they could tell me anything they liked because I wouldn’t understand what they were talking about and was therefore a soft target to sell to. It was part of the reason I set up my own business, to help smaller businesses get good sound, affordable help with their SEO.

Over the next few months I am going to be rolling out some useful info to help you sole traders and small businesses get a grasp of how all this works and how you can get control of your own website and do some effective marketing through it.

If you require any further information contact me on sue@thecolchesterseocompany.co.uk