This is the first in a series of articles to help small to medium business owners get the most from their websites.
Optimizing a website to show up in search ranking, getting potential clients to click to your website and ultimately stay there and somehow “convert”, is a lot of work, that is best done consistently over long periods of time.
Most small business owners that contact me do not have a marketing budget of $700 monthly, my current entry-level package, to afford my services, nor do they want to invest a minimum of 3 months to see a return on their investment. The truth is that with some education, good organization skills and 2 to 4 hours per week, most business owners can do this work themselves. I am here, hopefully, to provide some of that education.
Types of Websites
What kind of website do you need?
Why do you need a website? This is the first question to ask yourself. Different businesses have different clients, who want to know different things depending on the product or service you are selling and upon the client demographic. I have broken types of websites into a few categories below, each with different intents and requirements.
Basic Information Website – Single Page Websites
Do you just want a web presence to tell clients where you are, how to contact you and very basically tell users what you do? If so, a very basic one-page website will suffice for this. It is very difficult to rank a website like this because the content is very thin. Luckily Google offers a free service called, Google My Business or GMB, that will surface your business in search as a knowledge panel on the search engine results page or SERP or in the “Local Pack” of similar local businesses. These listings are all served locally and are attached to Google Maps. This service is free and allows you to enter information about your business like contact information, hours of operation, address all with a link back to your website. Clients can leave reviews on your GMB page and new potential clients can read how great you are.
I urge all businesses, regardless of size, to claim their knowledge panel and fill out the information on their GMB page.
Brochure Websites
When you need to provide more information than just the basics a brochure website has several pages that can list different product information and related services that you offer. Brochure websites can vary from about 5 pages to several thousand pages depending on how large your product offering is.
Providing Information
Brochure websites do not do any online selling, they are about providing information about products and related services. You may include information like brands, sizes, differences between models, optional add-ons and links to pdf brochures provided by manufacturers.
PDF Brochures
PDFs need to be branded with your brand and brand-friendly meta-data added to the PDFs before they are placed on your website, just the same as if you were handing out printed copies of the PDF brochures. I am always surprised how many large brands do not take advantage of meta-data fields provided by PDFs. This can usually be accomplished by PDF editors that you can purchase for under $100, assuming you do not already own some expensive Adobe software that can do it.
Gallery Section
Brochure websites often include gallery sections that have images showing off your best work. Companies like landscapers, pool builders, fence and deck builders can send potential clients to the gallery section of their websites which negates the need for them to send emails with dozens of images to each potential client.
I will cover how to optimize images for the web in a later article.
Providing Advice
This is your opportunity to shine, just as if you were talking to your client face-to-face, you can offer opinions about what is the best product for a given situation or the best service-type that will meet the client’s goals. Here is where you get to show off all that experiential knowledge you have gained through working with these products. You can write blog posts on your website outlining common situations and how you approach it. This is just a way of showing your clients you know what you are talking about.
eCommerce Websites
The Dream
The dream of selling online, making money while you sleep, raking in thousands of dollars while sipping on margaritas in the Virgin Islands – yup, that’s the dream!
The Reality
The reality is that eCommerce websites require a lot of work, constant attention and have loads of competition, including Amazon, Best Buy Marketplace, Google Marketplace, Walmart, Staples, Canadian Tire and a host of medium-size corporations vying for consumer disposable dollars.
Scope Out the Competition
The first thing you need to do is scope out the competition, see who else is selling your product. What are they doing well, what are they doing poorly? Is there a service they are not providing with the product? Do they have an awful return policy, delivery policy, is their shopping cart system confusing – whatever it is you can do better is the only way you can make a go of selling online.
Outranking the Competition
There are several ways to make you products outrank your competitors in search results, I will cover many of these in upcoming articles, but by far, organization and ease of navigation are the things that will keep users on your website and speed would be the third thing I would focus on. Users need to be able to find your products easily. This means several routes can be followed to find the same product because people think differently from each other; some will choose colour first, while others choose brand first; you must provide paths for different users to reach the same product. Speed is important because users will abandon your site if it takes 4 seconds to load each page.
Product Information
You must provide, consistent, up-to-date information, with plenty of images, but not too many images because that may slow your website down.
Example:
Recently I wanted to purchase a winter coat, I amassed 10 candidates then eliminated those that did not specify the filling type, I wanted down filled. I eliminated anything that described the filling ambiguously like, “down-proof” or “polyester-down”. Lastly I eliminated products that did not show an image of a model wearing the coat because there is no way to judge the length of the coat on a white background. I wanted a coat that would extend down to mid-thigh. In the end I was left with 1 possibility. That does not mean the others were not good, after all they were the best 10 in over 100 I viewed, what it means is the information provided by the seller was incomplete or ambiguous.
Shopping Cart Builders
There are a few shopping cart builders: WooCommerce and OpenCart are probably the biggest two. The advantage of these is they are cheap, maybe even free, they are highly customizable, offer a great deal of flexibility and integrate with WordPress easily. The downside is that all this flexibility means you have to do a great deal of setup on your own. On the bright side, there are hundreds of tutorials on YouTube. You will need to set up bank accounts, payment processors, shipping providers and integrate with their shipping estimate API, set up tables for tax structures for different geographic locations, and decide how to handle shipping several different items in a single box. This all has a steep learning curve and requires time and effort.
Hosted Shopping Carts
The other way to go is to host your products on a platform like Shopify. You still have to provide detailed information about the products you are selling, but things like payment processing and shipping provider API integration is already set up for you. Of course, this all comes with fees. Your product layouts, navigation and general flexibility are curtailed but not desperately so. This is a good choice for the beginner to online selling. Other choices include selling your products on Amazon, who take hefty commissions to use their ecosystem, as do the other online marketplace providers.
Knowing Your Clients
Everyone buys my product!
I hear this so often and the reality is, this is not true. Clients buy from you for a reason, be it: pricing, delivery, location, knowledge, time constraints, or maybe it is your winning personality, I don’t know…but you should.
Why do clients buy from YOU
The 80/20 rule states that you will get 80% of your sales from 20% of your customers. I can tell you this is true. The theory goes on to say that you get 10% of your sales from the next 10% of your customers, which means you get the remaining 10% of your money from the bottom 70% of the people who buy from you. This bottom 70% of people who buy, notice I do not call them customers, because they are not, they roving buyers you have no relationship with, who waste 70% of your resources for very little return. Your efforts are better spent offering a larger selection of products to your top 20%, so they will buy more, and additional services to the next 10% to try to move them to the top 20% group.
Knowing why clients buy from you is important!
Marketing Personas
Once you know why clients buy from you, you can get a picture of who these clients are. Remember to stick to the top 20% of your clients. Who are they? What demographic attributes do they possess? Once you know this you can make up marketing personas, 2 or 3 to start with. Give each persona a name and list their personal attributes, then flesh them out with likely personality traits. This will help you to develop your website intent in how the website will interact with your different marketing personas. Ask, “What would Bill like to see here?” or “Do you think Karen would like be interested in this add-on service here or should we propose something else?” If used correctly, marketing personas help to shape the finer details of your website intent.
Unique Selling Point – USP
As mentioned above, you should know why clients buy from you, and looking at your marketing personas, ask yourself, “What makes these people buy from me?” The answer to this question can be your Unique Selling Point (or proposition). What makes you stand out from the competition for these people? Whatever it is, should be boiled down to a phrase or a few words and used in all your marketing efforts.
Rinse & Repeat
For eCommerce and Brochure type websites it is important to have Google Analytics or another analytics service installed on your website so you can see the effect of changes that you make to your website. Track those changes and see if the same change can be applied to other parts of your website.
Summary
Website Intent is all about deciding what you want to do online:
- Tell people what business you are in, where you are, and how to contact you.
- Show people types of products you sell or what services you provide or both and how they go together
- Sell products online, ship the products remotely and collect payments online
Website Intent requires that you know your client and why they like to buy from you, building marketing personas around your best clients and tailoring your website layout and offerings to appeal to that persona in the hopes of cultivating more clients just like the best you already have.
Further Reading
About the Author
Steve has been working in the website marketing and search engine optimization fields for many years. Currently, he is working mostly with industrial clients. In the past he has worked in a variety of fields from stem-cell research to home improvement. Steve can be contacted via email at mail@harrisweb.ca
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