Developing a website can be a daunting task for technical people (techies) and non-technical people alike. It is important in the early planning phase of your business to determine the goals of your website. I like to think of developing a Website Plan as a structured but simple, elegant, informal document to better assist in reaching your vision for your website and how it supports you and/or your company.

Static websites may as well be dead. Google actively crawls websites at different intervals to determine which content has changed. If a website’s content has not changed then it becomes buried in the millions or billions of other pages on the web. Be sure to keep up with your website content and to keep it up to date. Small changes such as: sharpening key words, adding clauses that say similar statements in a different way, and improving the quality of your information will help keep your website on good terms with the Google search engine rankings.

Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is within reach for nearly all websites. With billions of searches per day it is important to determine what phrases will people by typing into your website to find you. Some of these phrases can be coined as “long tailing” search terms because they may be extremely rare but important to a small percentage of people. Remember, with the internet your market is the world and 1% of the total population is still a rather large number on the order of 75.3 million people! Just to reiterate 1% of the total population of the United States of America is approximately 3.27 million! Don’t worry about marketing to the masses at this point. Clearly define who your ideal customer is and plan all of your content based on that.

Schedule Adding New Content Regularly

Develop a weekly or monthly schedule to add new Blog posts or Articles to your website. Determine how many total articles per year need to be written and divvy it up in a way that makes sense for your schedule and your business’s needs. Keeping blog posts and page content written in a Microsoft Word document can help when you want to edit and revise content or to improve upon it at a later date.

Landing Pages and Calls to Action

How will your customers interact with your website? The answer is simple – give them a way to interact via a Landing Page or Call to Action. Your website needs to enable customers to take the next step. Define what that next step may look like. It may be that they need to call to set an appointment having your companies mobile number linked on their website enables them to click the link and call you immediately. What about including a Contact Form on your website so customers can get in touch with you and schedule an appointment through an automated system? These are simple features that can help your customer connect with you to take the next step in purchasing a product or service.

Communicate your Vision

A website is like a first impression with meeting a potential client. Think about the branding, is it clear, bold, confident? Does the website load fast? The recommended speed is 3 seconds or less! Does the writing communicate your best to the customer? The content in an “About Us” page should be descriptive but it should also present more about why you are doing what you are doing. Why should the customer choose you? What makes your team better than all the others? Communicating your Mission and Vision clearly will help bridge the connection to build a successful business relationship.

Images

Along with the style of your brand the types of Images displayed on your website are important. Are the photos clear and crisp? Do they inspire confidence? Do they have nice rounded aesthetically pleasing borders around a head shot of your customer service members? These are all little details that may cost $200 for a photo shoot but will be well worth the result in the long run because they inspire confidence.

Building Social Profiles

When starting a website it is hard to acquire back links from other websites. This is where using Social Networks becomes a huge advantage for new website owners. These profiles are generally free to create and can be adapted to keep the same branding as your website. It is important to keep all of the information consistent across your website and all other social platforms. If the information doesn’t line up or there are errors or omissions then the search engines can see this and penalize the sites performance due to these errors. Social Profiles can also have the advantage of attracting users that may not find your website through a google search. As of this writing, it is highly recommended to build a business profile or page on: Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reedit.

Linking Content within Your Site

It is important to build links into your site that refer to other pages and having no broken links. This is so important that it should be included in your website plan. Many websites also have a “Contact Webmaster” button or e-mail link that allows customers or visitors to get in touch with the webmaster if the site is broken. Linking different pages in your site will help it become higher in the search engine rankings. Applying links to pages should be well thought out with the right keywords and heading tags and links to help build the reputation focusing on those keywords. The downside to adding links is that if a page changes its filename or URL then the link will become broken and this will penalize your search engine rankings.

Actively Re Submitting XML Sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools

To help boost more performance out of your website consider doing all of the above and finally create a new sitemap, upload it to your server, and re-submit your site on the Google Search Console as often as necessary to keep google crawling your website. This is essential when monitoring Google Analytics and trying to get your daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly website visitors up. If your count is low then it is likely due to an issue above and fixing the issue and re-submitting your site should help bring about a positive change. If it doesn’t, please get in touch with us so we can help!

Partner with Pima Web Design to help create a Website Plan for 2019