Owning a Web site just isn’t enough for a small business owner to access the benefits offered by an internet presence. Yes, an effective website will bring new leads and sales, strengthen customer relationships, and even reduce wasteful spending (just to name a few of the many benefits) but the key word is effective.
What Makes an Effective Small Business Website?
An effective website for a small business begins with the domain itself. It’s common to use your own company name for a website address, but this is a highly debated concept with no right or wrong answer. Using your company name as a domain, if it is available, will make your website accessible to existing customers, but what about potential new customers who don’t already know you exist?
Choosing a simple, catchy domain name that accurately describes the nature of your business is a good start to an effective website. It’s helpful to use a domain which includes a keyword that describes your small business (for SEO purposes) but the most important thing is accessibility. An effective website will focus more on end user perspective than anything else.
With that being said, an effective website will be useful and informative to your website visitors. It’s amazing how many small business owners will shell out thousands of dollars on a professional web developer or designer, and yet still have to produce their own website content… the most important part of any small business website.
Web copywriters specialize in creating professional web content that serves many purposes and meets the high standards of a general audience (internet users) with a priority on the unique needs of your target market.
Many web developers and graphic designers will outsource to web copywriters to produce a complete package for small business clients, because the visual appearance of your website is just one of many key elements that make up an effective web presence.
A strong website will include:
1) A professional design that perfectly maintains your unique business image
2) An easy to use navigation system, allowing users to quickly access the information they need
3) Clear, concise, and visually appealing content on each web page that is useful to readers while also being optimized for search engines
4) A call to action (what you would like users to do next)
5) A newsletter or sign up form for email alerts, allowing interested customers to be notified of special offers and/or new information relevant to the nature of your business
6) Fresh content, updated regularly
7) A pleasant experience to visitors, and rewarding results to the website owner
Gaining New Leads and Sales with an Effective Small Business Website:
Once a website is complete, you can gain new leads through search engines. There are two ways to drive targeted consumers to your website based on relevant searches. The first is through optimal organic placement in the search results, which is the most powerful and cost effective marketing tool. It’s very simple to accomplish if you work with web copywriters who specialize in search engine optimization and marketing. Other SEO providers can help, but they will outsource web copywriting tasks. When you work directly with a web copywriter, you save money by accessing “whole sale rates” on effective web copy and SEO content.
An example of a search engine optimization campaign would include focusing on a keyword that is relevant to your product or service… an exact phrase that your market would use when searching for your product or service. Web copywriters would create helpful topics, using that keyword phrase, and publish content across the internet that would be an exact match for relevant searches. This would include onsite optimization (a keyword blog or article published on your website) as well as external publications with credible and relevant websites, linking back to a specific page on your website.
There are a number of ways to optimize for the search engines, but no SEO campaign is effective without the services of web copywriters. Our sister company iClimber offers content writing services, so if you do not have a good writer, contact us for a quote.
Since search engines are the first place an internet user will go to find information they are looking for, search engine marketing and optimization is the single most powerful way to gain new leads. It may take some time before your small business website will gain organic listings, especially if you dealing with a competitive niche, but you can use sponsored listings to quickly reach a target audience (based on relevant search terms) and attract new leads.
Sponsored listings are PPC (pay per click) advertising where you set your own price. The perfect solution for
small business owners with a tight budget, you can spend pennies a day to directly reach a targeted audience. Google’s PPC program, Adwords, will even allow you to place targeted ads across relevant content networks.
Of course, if you want to make each impression of your ad count… you’ll want to use effective ads. Yet another service offered by experienced web copywriters.