This blog post is of benefit if you have a business that serves a local market. If you want your website to work harder by helping you attract more new customers, increase sales, etc, here are 5 easy ways to do this:
1. Improving Your Website
More website visitors is supposed to mean: more leads, more enquiries and more sales. This is true ONLY if you have a great website that is strategically crafted to encourage people to want to do business with you. There are certain ingredients that build trust and make your website appeal to your intended audience (potential customers) that need to be included within your website to make this happen. If you’re not sure if your website has them, request us to do a free website audit. It’s also worthwhile reading about what actually are strategically crafted performer websites.
Side note: Did you know that the average website visitor does not spend long on your website, unless there are really compelling reasons to do so? If you’re not familiar with the 3:30:3 Rule, it is worth knowing about. Please also note:
- You have 3 – 6 seconds to capture the attention of someone who visits your website for the first time, else they will leave and probably won’t ever come back.
- On average a first time website visitor only stays on a website owned by a service-based business for a few minutes.
- In many instances a person won’t contact your business unless they have visited your website a few times, or received some useful emails from you (via a sign-up form on your website).
- To entice people to return to your website, you can do the following: Add a subscribe form to your website. Once someone subscribes, send them weekly or fortnightly emails. This can be easily automated using software like MailChimp or GoHighLevel.
- Adding quality blog posts to your website will also help encourage website visitors to return. Same too if you list products on your website and/or embed interesting videos.
If you don’t own a performer website and if you don’t create ways to quickly capture the attention of people when they visit your website, and/or don’t offer a way for them to connect with your business (via a subscribe form), you’ll lose a lot of potential new customers. They’ll instead become customers of your competitors.
Additional note: These 7 things are extremely important if you want your website to perform well:
- Adding the right ingredients into a website *
- Ensure it makes a great first impression FAST
- Make sure your website is compelling
- Make sure it loads quickly
- Invest in website Conversion Rate Optimisation.
- Invest in effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
- Learn about what is called ‘E-E-A-T‘. It stands for ‘Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness’. Adding excellent E-E-A-T signals into your website is massively important.
Learning how to effectively ‘blog for business‘ within your website also aids with E-E-A-T signals. Our website writers help our clients with this.
Tip: If you want more customers, definitely also consider offering one or more irresistible offers within your website. More info about this is here.
* The right Website Ingredients
The right ingredients added into your website helps build trust. The more someone trusts your website, the more inclined they will be to do business with you.
Some good forms of website ingredients include:
- Customer testimonials (especially ones that are insightful and fast to read)
- Reviews from Google (from your Google Business Profile)
- Google Star Review Badges
- Video testimonials
- Industry license numbers
- Recently awarded business awards
- Accreditations and industry bodies you are registered with (include their logos)
- ABN and/or ACN number
- Case studies
- Useful blog posts
- Easy to read but informative content
- Selling points
- Points of differentiation. As in, communicate the differences between what your business offers vs what your competitors offer. Prove/ explain why your business is better in non-overly brash ways. Work with website content writers like us to help you with this.
You need to add a good combination of the above listed ingredients into your website, if you want your website to start performing and working harder.
There are many other ingredients that can also be added. It depends on your business, your industry and your customer market.
2. Choose Target Search Terms
You can make all the improvements to your website under the sun, but it won’t make a difference towards achieving business growth if you don’t attract more visitors to your website.
People need to discover your website; to learn that it exists. This then increases the number of website visitors.
To gain more ‘discovery’, social media will help… if done the right way.
HOWEVER, a FAR more effective way to also gain more discovery & visitor traffic is by leveraging the potential power of Google and other search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo.
To do this you need to first start by choosing search terms (keyword phrases) that people search in Google to find your business type. This is extremely important but ONLY the first step in the process.
Btw, this process is called “website visitor traffic acquisition strategy”. Also known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). If you are new to business you may not have heard the term ‘SEO’ before.
For a local business, these search terms (‘keyword phrases’) include words like like:
- [service name] [location]
- [service name] near me
For example:
- Dress maker Mt Gravatt
- Dress maker near me
- Mower person to mow my yard Emerald
- boat servicing Nambour
- podiatrist Indooroopilly
- home reno business Bargara
- etc
For a business that sells products nation-wide these search terms include:
- [product name] [buy online]
- [product name] [best prices online]
For example:
- heavy duty tractor slasher best brands
- buy quality candles online
- best brands women’s clothes
- custom made wetsuits
- pool shade-cloth best buy
- 85 inch tv buy at best price
- etc
You (and/or SEO professionals working for you) then use these search terms in all your digital marketing including your Local SEO website optimisations (see part 5 of this blog post for more info) and nation-wide SEO optimisation work (if you sell state-wide and/or nation-wide).
A website without effective traffic acquisition strategies and SEO is not a finished website. As in, creating the website and adding the right ingredients is only half the job. The other half of the job is the SEO work. Only when both these things are done correctly will you own a performer website that works hard.
3. Learn about NAP
NAP is an acronym that stands for Name, Address, and Phone number. The NAP for your business needs to be correct and consistent online. The same NAP details should appear on your website, your Facebook Business Page, your other social media profiles, your Google Business Profile, online business directory listings and anywhere else your business is listed online.
It is worth checking that your NAP details are correct in every instance online, especially if you have changed addresses at some point, or purchased your business from someone else and/or your business name (and/or phone number) has changed.
More info about the importance of NAP is here.
4. Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free tool that Google provides. It allows businesses to appear in Google Maps. If well optimised you may also get your business listed in the highly coveted ‘Google 3-pack‘ (or ‘Google Map Pack’, as it is called. Only 3 businesses can ever earn their way into this 3-pack for any Google Search.
We strongly advise to always keep your Google Business Profile up to date, along with all your other online business directory listings. Make sure your NAP details are correct, that you are linking to your website and that you are including your target keyword phrases within the GBP business information text.
Also check for any Negative SEO (as it is called). Learn more about it here.
Also ask as many happy customers as possible to write a review on your Google Business Profile. Note: Don’t ask all customers at the same time though. If you do this and then there is an instant big increase in number of reviews, Google may see this as ‘gamey’. Google wants reviews to be added ‘organically’. To avoid this, simply ask 3 – 5 customers at a time if they would like to write a review. Continue this activity every 4 or so weeks until you have asked all your happy customers (those you know will write a positive review).
Please note: We also strongly recommend optimising your Google Business Profile for best results. You can start learning how to do this by watching these videos (below). If you would like, you can also contact us for help. Same too if you want help with anything mentioned in this blog post.
5. Local SEO
If you are a local business serving a local market, your website will start working MUCH harder once you start doing Local SEO. Same too if you service a specific geographic area (for example: Maryborough to Rockhampton), state wide, and/or nation-wide.
SEO is an involved topic. Knowing how to do it correctly is critical. The aim of Local SEO is to:
- Get your website ranking towards the top of page 1 of the Google Search Engine Results Pages (called SERPs) for your target keyword phrases and other keyword phrases that are also of benefit
- Achieve the same thing within other commonly used Search Engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo
- Get mentioned in voice-search products like Google Voice Search and Amazon Alexa (a SEO article about this is here)
- Contend with and adapt to AI Search
- Encourage people to click into your website and then perform a desired action. This could include but is not limited to: phoning you, sending you an online form enquiry, subscribing (if you have a subscribe form set up), buying from your website (if you sell products directly on your website), ordering products from you if you include an online product catalogue and/or signing up to a lead-magnet (often a free offer), an irresistible offer, and/or engaging with your website in some other way, often via some other promotion you’re offering – eg. a flash-sale, Black Friday sales, EOFY sale, clearance bin, promo code, coupon book, etc
Owning a great website that has the right ingredients, plus effective Local SEO will make your website work hard for your business.
There are two tools you’ll want to use in order to monitor and measure how your Local SEO efforts are going. One is Google Analytics and it is free. This will allow you to check your website traffic growth. The other is a keyword phrase ranking tool. We use Semrush.
You may also want to use a good quality and affordable CRM program like GoHighLevel.
We are experts at each activity mentioned in this blog post. If you would like us to make your website work MUCH harder, so it makes you more money, contact us.
Bonus Tips
Google Ads can also be used to help gain more traffic to your website. Please note though:
- Some people turn off ads so they don’t see them. Info about the percentage of people that use Adblockers is here
- It is NOT easy to do effectively. At bare minimum you need to have some decent marketing, advertising and ‘marketing & website content writing’ AND ad writing skills
- You need to monitor your efforts regularly and ongoing, else you’ll find you’re wasting money
- Google offers a simpler version of Google Ads called Google AdWords Express, however is it worth using? Read this blog post to learn more
- Google Ads is technical & involved and if not done correctly, it can waste a lot of money. It has a steep learning curve and it requires ongoing training (because Google make changes, offers new features, etc, often)
- Effective Google Ads requires adding very well Conversion Rate Optimised landing pages in your website
Website Servicing
A website is NOT a ‘set and forget’ activity. It is a dynamic marketing tool that can be an absolute ‘business growth power-house’ secret (not so secret) weapon if you let it/ if you improve it, optimise it, update it, service it and increase traffic to it correctly.
I strongly suggest checking your website every 3 to 6 months. Check that it is accurate, that the content is up to date, and that it remains a great representative of your business. Amongst things:
- Check it is containing up to date info about all the main products and services you offer
- Does not refer to products and services you no longer offer
- Is better looking and reads far better than websites owned by your direct competitors
Just like owning a car, a website needs to be serviced and sometimes it needs to be replaced (updated to a new make and model). And just like owning a car, it is a very good idea to book your website in for a service/ a professional website review and audit every 6 months. Please note: We even offer a one-off free website review service.
It is also an extremely good idea to check that your website continues to rank well in Google for the keyword phrases your business cares about. Checking your rankings at least every 4 weeks is important. If you don’t, how will you know if you have lost rankings and/or a competitor has started out-ranking you? To check rankings correctly, you need to use actual ranking software like SEMRush.
Reviewing your Google Analytics data at least every 2 months is also a recommendation.
Most businesses pay experts to do this for them. It saves them time and they have peace-of-mind that everything is being checked correctly and accurately.
Conclusion
Your website is the central point of all your marketing. It is the one thing most people will view before contacting your business for the first time.
Your website can make a GREAT impression or it can make a very poor impression. If it makes a great impression it will help your business. If it doesn’t, it will hurt your business (and be a liability).
If you apply everything described in this blog post, your website will make a great impression, will gain more discovery & visitors, AND will start working MUCH harder for your business! You will see sales increase dramatically, PLUS they will continue to snow-ball if you keep up your Local SEO and related efforts. The more care, attention and effort you put into your website, the more it will deliver results!
One last important mention: Please also make sure your website is being regularly backed up and security updated. This needs to be done regularly to avoid your website getting compromised or hacked. If you are not sure if your website is being regularly security updated, contact us and we’ll check for you.
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