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Where do you start? You have a business and it’s going well, or you have a start-up, it’s your first day in the office and you don’t know how to attract customers. You consider printing flyers, buying magazine adds, billboards, radio spots or even TV spots. But there’s a problem! No matter what business you’re in you already have a lot of competition. That’s a given! So unless you are a pretty well established brand or you have a service or product that is so good that everyone will want to buy it, investing in those types of advertising outlets is a bad idea.
People used to think the best advertising is word of mouth. It used to be, but not anymore. For a customer to talk about your service or product, he either has to be super excited about it that he just can’t wait to share it with everyone he meets; which is rarely the case, or he just got out of your office/store and he met with someone and during their small talk he mentioned you. Word of mouth is just not that compelling anymore. People want to do their research now, they want to read descriptions, read reviews, see videos, check competition and compare services or products, they don’t just buy impulsively, they are more cautious of their money, even more after the 2008 recession.
Ok, when is buying printing press adds or video/audio adds a good idea? Well, in our opinion that’s usually the case when you become a known brand, when you have enough customers, feedback and revenue that you can easily set aside a budget for brand awareness, so that people see you brand more often and they automatically associate that brand with a specific service or product. It’s like when you see a Apple commercial, you instinctively associate Apple with smartphone (even though they manufacture laptops, pcs, table, headphones, etc). They became the first trillion dollar company because of they smartphones so that’s what people will associate them with.
All fine and dandy, but what about me? The start-up guy from the beginning of the article that’s on his first day and doesn’t know how to attract more customers.
We haven’t forgotten about you , what you should do is build a website. We know, it sounds so easy but it’s the easy things that are most complicated. Before building a website you should write down answers to these questions: - What services or products do I offer? And by this we mean are they low-cost, mid-cost or higher –end. Take in consideration a piece of advice from our own experience. It’s much, much, much easier to start at a higher-end and lower prices than it is to start at the lower-end and raise prices. We struggled with this for about 3 years, we lost a few of our clients because they were used to a certain price range and believed they could find the same services with a different company. Maybe they did, we don’t know, all we know (NOW) is that you can’t grow a business with low-prices where you just make ends meet.
- Who are my customers? Are they young, old? Male, female? What type of income do they have? Where are they getting their information from? These questions will help you structure out your website and the information you add to it.
- How should the website look? CLEAN and SIMPLE. The time for fancy, flashy, explosive web designs is long gone. The cleaner the website the more attractive it will be. You should take in consideration that a clean website will look just as good on a PC or Laptop as it would on a Phone or Tablet. Yes, responsiveness is a BIG MUST. More than 60% of your traffic will be from mobile devices, and if your website is not responsive people will not browse through it.
Have a well structured website with lots of information, photos and fresh look. Go with warm colors, pale combinations, rounded edges, clean buttons. Let your service or product drive the look of the website instead of trying to make your web design drive the service/product. - What information should I put? EVERYTHING. Make sure your website offers all the information about your service/product that a potential customer need to know before even considering buying. The more information you have be more comfortable your potential customers will be with your brand. For example: if you sell chairs, place information about the chair, about the manufacturer, about the types of people it’s designed for, technical specs, technical drawing, lots of photos, videos if you have, everything that would make a customer feel like he has all the information about your chair and all he has to do to get it is contact you or order it. Ambiguity leads people to other websites that sell chairs and offer them this information and guess what? They’ll buy it from your competition based you leaving your website to checkout theirs.
- What about SEO? What’s that? It’s in the tile of the article! SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. Given that the name is so long, one fella shortened it to SEO. This means optimizing your website so that when someone types a certain keyword in Google, your website shows in the search results. First places of the first page are everyone’s goal. But since there are only 10 result positions per page the battle of SEO is on.
- How do I do that? First of all you need to set some keywords. Use SEMrush to find out what your competitors get the most traffic and use those as well. Again you have competitors, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, someone else is already doing it. And that’s a great thing. It means people are using those types of services/products and it gives you a change to prove those people why they should buy from you.
Once you set the keywords, make sure you have good quality content and put those keywords in; they don’t have to all be the exact keywords, they can be similar ones, or derivatives but main keywords need to be in your content. They also need to be in your title tag and meta description of your pages. You’re meta description should never be something dull it should always be something interesting that sparks engagement from users.
Add Google Console and Google Analytics to your website and after a week or two check them out to see which keyword you rank for and which you don’t, that way you’ll know which keywords to work on. - Sitemap. You should have a sitemap.xml of your website and submit it to Google Search Console.
- Google MyBusiness. It will help drive potential customers near you or in your city better towards your business.
- Link Building. Yes! It’s still a thing! Contrary to popular believe, links to your website are the MAIN factor of which Google will rank your page. The more links you have to your website the more relevant your website will become and it will rank higher.
- Blogs. Blogs are a great way to keep your users up to date on your services or products and maintain a constant flow of content. Google doesn’t like dead sites, or sites that have been created, posted and left as is. If you don’t constantly work on your website, at some point your rankings will tank. Also, post your blog articles on sites that are relative to your business or article directories to generate backlinks.
- Headings. Your blog posts, pages should have H1 and H2 headings that contain the keywords you want to rank for.
This seems complicated! How long before I see results? This is usually the most common question we get asked. SEO is a waiting game and a long term process. If your keywords are niche or have a low competition, you will start seeing results in a couple of months or even sooner. If your keywords are more competitive (which means your competition is doing SEO for them too) then the results will take time. In our experience a freshly made website will take around 4-6 months to rank page 2, and up to 8-9 months to rank page 1.
Keep in mind that all these steps are pretty much a short version of a larger discussion. You should also do your own research about SEO and Web Design on other articles or website. Only take the commonly presented information, because that’s usually the right way to go. And if you feel like you need more information you can always contact our Web Design Timisoara company and we will be more than happy to talk and clarify any concerns you might have. We have a saying: "O agentie de optimizare SEO Timisoara se vede in toata Tara!" which would translate to "A goog SEO company from Timisoara will rank high nation wide!" It's sounds better in Romanian
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