So you’ve decided to build a website for your business. This blog will give you some guidance on the things to do to start off right. One of the questions I’m frequently asked is how much a website will cost and to be honest the answer differs greatly. It all depends on your business needs and your budget. So the real answer is your website should cost as much as you are willing to spend.
The most important thing in my opinion is that you make each page on your website a “landing page” this way as your website visitor navigates through to the site they will have a better chance of converting into a lead. What is a landing page I hear you ask? The anatomy of a landing page goes some way to explaining this and gives you a guide for creating a landing page.
The second thing when building a website for your business is to pick the keywords that you would like to show up on google for, write your website content for these keywords and create your pages for these keywords. The keyword planner from Google is a great way to learn how many people search for the keywords you like best each month and can also give you some suggestions on alternative keywords to use. Pick the keywords, and write the content second. For instance, if you were a plumber in London, a good keyword would be “plumber London” so write a page that contains this keyword and it will give you a better chance of ranking than a page that doesn’t have this keyword.
Choose a website that has a CMS, I favour WordPress as it is easy to use, offers a range of themes and comes with so many plugins that just make life so much easier. Using a CMS will help you save money in the long run as it will mean that you don’t have to go back to your web designer for every single change you want to make.
At the very least create the following pages:
Home
Services
About
Contact us
How to layout a homepage gives some insight into the type of information that you will want to put on your homepage to make the website look professional.
Ideally your services will be broken down further into multiple pages for the multiple services you offer, this will be better for SEO. For example our own website breaks our services down into PPC, SEO and web design, and further breaks them down again by location, meaning we have specific pages for each of these keywords/locations and thus have a better chance of ranking organically for these keywords. But if you don’t have time to break them up, then get all of your services on this page, explain what they are and why they will benefit your website visitor.
Your about us page should tell your potential customer about yourself or company, what you do, why you love doing it and why your website visitor should get you to do it for them.
The contact us page is pretty self explanatory, ideally there will be a map pointing to your business address, your email, phone number and a quick contact form to send you their information.
In fact get a quick contact form on every single page on your website, this will increase conversions – guaranteed! The easier you make it for a website visitor to give you their information, the more likely they are to do it.
Ideally your website will have a blog as well so that you can add new content that is relevant to your visitors, but if you are struggling to write content and break your services up into separate pages there is no way you will be sitting down regularly to write a blog, so leave it out.
If you do use WordPress CMS get your web designer to install the visual composer plugin or another drag and drop page builder. This will allow you to create great looking pages in future without having a whole lot of technical knowledge.
And that’s your basic website covered. If you want any help, suggestions or a quote to build this website for you, then feel free to get in touch with our Search team.