Your website is very likely to be one of the first places where your potential customers find out about you and your business. And we all know first impressions count. So this is your opportunity to stand out from the competition and tell the world that you’re the best at what you do.
Producing original and interesting content for your website can be challenging – let alone enticing people there in the first place. But there are things you can do to make the process a little less daunting, and get those creative juices flowing.
It’s all about the home page
It’s a bit of a cliché but you really need to treat your home page like a shop window: it has to grab your readers’ attention and tell them what you’re all about. Research shows that users decide to stay or leave a website in the first ten seconds of a visit. What’s on your home page that would encourage people to stay?
Bear in mind that readers are likely to skim website text, taking in just one quarter of the information in front of them, so it’s critical to have highly visible and focused key information.
Spend some time honing in on exactly what your unique selling points are. Think about what you want your visitors to do after they’ve landed on your home page: do you want them to take a look around the site? Or do you want them to pick up the phone and get in touch?
Speak your target audience’s language
Establish an instant connection with your website visitors. Think about the information they need and give it to them. People read websites very differently to magazines and newspapers, so strip out industry jargon and make it as easy to read as possible. Find visual ways to get your point across – try infographics and statistics to give a snapshot view of your business and how you can help organisations like theirs.
Once you’ve got them hooked, offer a bit more information about who you are and what you do.
Ultimately, your visitors are potential customers you need to convince them that your services will meet their needs, and that doing business with you makes sense.
Get inspired
Don’t feel overwhelmed when you start writing for your website. Take a look at other websites you like – they don’t even have to be in your field. You can get inspiration from all sorts of sources.
Choose your keywords
But it’s not just great content you need. You need to get people to your website in the first place.
Using the right keywords is a great place to start. Put very simply, people type keywords into a search engine when they’re looking for something. Include the right keywords in your content and your site will be much more likely to show up in a Google or Bing search.
Think about the words and phrases people are likely to use when they’re looking for a site like yours, and try to include them in your copy. There’s an art to it – don’t be tempted to squeeze in all the keywords you can think of, as this will leave you with an unreadable web page. The people behind the search engines are constantly changing the way they calculate their rankings too, so it might be worthwhile talking to someone who can give advice on the best ways to use your keywords.
Use social media and blogs
Blogging is a great way to add new content to your website (a big plus for those search engine rankings) and, along with social media, it’s an effective tool for driving people to your website.
Always make sure you include links back to your website on tweets and other social networking platforms. Share new blog posts and find more readers/followers by posting links to them on websites such as Reddit and StumbleUpon.
Check it’s working
You’ve created some fantastic content, used your keywords and blogged away. How do you know if your efforts have paid off?
There are lots of different tools you can use to gauge how your website is performing. Google Analytics is a really good way to see how many visitors are coming to your site, how they’ve found it, and what they do when they get there. If people are leaving your site after just a few seconds (bouncing) you know there’s something wrong: that your home page isn’t working for them for example, or maybe your keywords are getting your site to turn up in the wrong searches.
Creating and managing content on a website is demanding: it needs to be original and regularly refreshed. All businesses are unique and what works for one may not work for another. But, the great thing about websites is that we expect them to change. So don’t feel defeated if something hasn’t worked – take it off and try again!
