Making Sure Your Website Is Right For Your Business
With the UK ecommerce market set to hit the £68.4 billion mark in 2009, it's fair to say that the age of technology has been a very welcome one for retailers. But as we journey deeper into a recession, it seems that hardly a day passes by without at least one well-known and seemingly "safe" business falls into administration or liquidation and the high streets are starting to look much emptier than they once were.
With this in mind, it makes sense that all businesses try to improve and expand their profiles and get those much needed customers to spend, spend, spend.. The internet provides a new face for any business and reaches out to customers on an international level. Search engine optimisation techniques and affiliate marketing make for simple but effective methods of ensuring that a business is seen and heard, and those who are yet to embark upon a website for their business will be surprised at how cost effective they can be.
New businesses in particular are likely to struggle in today's economic climate but a website can literally project any new company into the public eye over night. An ecommerce website allows a business to operate twenty four hours a day, seven days a week and with the right marketing, can build up a good reputation quickly.
For many smaller businesses who have perhaps been putting off having a website, then the change is vital. The yellow pages catalogue is practically redundant as people increasingly look to the internet to find exactly what they want and at the best price. Those that are not familiar with website technology may find it daunting to begin with, but there is plenty of help available and the skills of a good website designer should never be underestimated.
As with most marketing, it is important to remember that a website will become a reflection not just of your business, but of you as well. 46% of Britons now read online reviews and recommendations on a specific product before buying, and two thirds of us research the internet for information about a retailer before making a purchase. Reputation, it would seem, is just as important as image and therefore it is vital for any website to not just please aesthetically, but to be practical and user friendly as well.
A good website designer will know all of this of course, and will be able to reach your target audience in a way that perhaps even you hadn't been able to previously achieve. A combination of good graphics, strong and relevant content and clarity in what your business is all about are perhaps the key elements of how a website should be presented - images in particular are more important to those who want to reach out to a foreign market for whom English might not be their first language.
Ultimately the creation of your site needs to be driven by the target search terms for which you wish to achieve presence in the search engines. Identifying the right terms is of course determined by the nature of your business and your target audience. There are plenty of tools available such as Google's AdWords Keyword Suggestion tool which allows you to type in a phrase and see related searches, the volume of searches and some indication as to the degree of competition for those phrases. This should be enough to guide your decisions as to the "sweet spot" of relevant phrases that have reasonable search terms but for which competition isn't totally insane. Your site should then be designed around these phrases with judicious use of internal links, the anchor text for these links (often in the main menu structure); suitable entries in the meta tags and use of header tags (H1, H2 and so forth) together with Alt text on images. A decent web designer will understand all of the! on-page factors involved in optimising for specific search terms.
You will also need to create rich, unique content, relevant to your products, services and the market in which you operate. A deep understanding of the consumer is vital as is the need to include your target keywords at a density of some 2-4% (opinions vary and it makes sense to have inconsistency in density across pages as this shows human editing).
Whether you are building a new business, deciding whether or indeed how to buy a company with an online presence or indeed moving an established offline business into the online world, there are plenty of website designers to choose from but is definitely worth doing your research before committing - check out the competition first, research rival company websites, find out exactly who and where your target market are. With a suitably designed and well promoted site, your business will reap the rewards as it finds its true place out there on the world wide web.
