A good website can work for your business in so many ways. It can help you establish your brand, demonstrate your professionalism, find new customers, and make more sales. Luckily, it is also easier than ever to build a website with little to no investment.
The best website builders allow you to easily build a professional-looking website, even if you have very little technical knowledge or experience. By taking the right approach you can create an effective site that will help you to promote your business, and avoid the pitfalls that can damage the effectiveness of your site.
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Here are 4 things you should know before creating your website.
1. Know Your Point of Difference
Before you get started on building your site, it is critical to know how you are going to present your business and your brand on your website for the best results. In order to know this, you need to start by defining your point of difference. What is it about the brand that makes you unique, and will convince customers to buy from you? How will you design your site to make it stand out from your competition?
Part of knowing how to best speak to your audience is to have a detailed understanding of who your target audience is. Clearly define the target market that you are trying to speak to through your site. As part of this, think about what they do and don’t know about your products, what they will be interested in learning, and their level of technical understanding and knowledge of terms related to your industry. All of this is essential for everything from knowing what to include on your site to how you present it and the language you use.
2. Be Prepared to Put in the Time
You may very well be able to build a site yourself using a website builder that is free or only involves a small monthly fee. In this way, it is very possible to create a website with little to no financial investment. However, you should be prepared that you will need to invest quite a lot of something else: your time.
Creating a website from scratch is relatively easy to do. You can even do it if you have never built a site before, but if so this will involve a fairly steep learning curve. Like any kind of new skill, this takes time to master. Set aside an adequate amount of time – both in terms of work hours and the overall length of time for the project. If you cannot dedicate this amount of time due to other commitments, it might be a good idea to consider outsourcing the project to someone else.
3. Set Your Goals
Another thing that you should have clear right from the beginning is the goals and objectives you have for your site. It is important to take a strategic approach to building your website, and the key foundation of to any strategy is knowing what you want to get out of it. Setting clear goals for your website before you start building it means you will be able to focus on the things that important, and skip those which will not contribute to your goals.
It will mean that you can tailor your site to meet your goals exactly and efficiently. In setting your goals, make sure you also determine how you will measure your progress towards these goals: set measurable indicators that you check along the way to make sure you are staying on track.
4. Learn about SEO
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is critical to any website these days. Your site will serve to present your business and products to people who already know about your business, and have come to it from a link you sent them, for example. However, your site can also serve to attract new customers that otherwise would never have heard about you. According to recent figures, 35% of people look for a product on Google, while 86% of people use it to search for a business. This means that ranking your site as high as possible on Google’s results can attract a wealth of new business. And for this, you need SEO.
SEO is a huge industry these days, and can be very complicated. You don’t need to become an SEO expert overnight – indeed, this would take years. However, educating yourself on at least the basics of SEO will help you to greatly improve your site’s Google ranking and drive more traffic, and therefore potential customers, to your website.
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