I have a website! Now what?

If you’re saying to yourself – “I have a website.  Now what?” – then this is that article for you.  We’re going to explain how to start from zero (or just a baby of a website in this case) and work your way towards internet marketing success!  These are the techniques used to market our own businesses, and those of our clients, so that you’ll be able to follow the steps to make your internet exposure vast, professional and exciting – and growing your business in the process.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll be assuming that like us, you’re a small business hoping to use the internet to generate leads, phone calls, emails and enquiries – to look incredibly professional and well branded, to grow your business, build your client base, create customer loyalty and built trust. That type of thing.

Here goes…

1 – I have a website! I’m on my way…

Great! You finally own a website that you love. We find that many of our clients have been through hell even getting to this point. What with shoddy so called web designers over-promising and under-delivering, charging over-inflated prices and such, for some of our clients it must feel like finally owning a great website is the end of the road. It’s not.

Your website will become a super important asset to your business though. We like to think of our website as the hub; the central point of everything that we do online, with other internet activity being used to strengthen it’s credibility and drive traffic to it. More about that later…

So assuming that your website is the important central hive of activity as far as your business online is concerned, there are a few things to consider that are going to be really important moving forward.

The scalability of your website

To get maximum exposure on Google (and other search engines of course) with your website, it’s all about great content and a great user experience. The way we explain this to our clients is – “try to become the best source of information online about what you do as a business”. Answer every possible question your prospects might ever ask of a business like yours, use video to help you do this where appropriate, grow the scale of your website so that, over time, it becomes encyclopedic on the subject of your business and your industry.

This, of course, takes a great deal of time and effort but the rewards of persevering are awesome!

What we’re trying to get to here is that the platform on which your website is published (WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Static HTML) really does need to be easily scalable. It’ll need a blog, a database and a method which makes it easy to grow the content of your website, whilst maintaining ease of use for your visitor. Our personal preference for scalability and for achieving outstanding exposure online is WordPress. You’re reading from a WordPress website right now.

Is your website responsive? Mobile, tablet and desktop friendly?

It’s all well and good owning a great website with great content, but if it doesn’t work beautifully on all devices, particularly smart phones, you’ll miss out on a lot of interaction. You’ll also demonstrate a higher bounce rate to Google which will send a warning to the search giant, that people are not enjoying your website much. Really bad!

We’re scalable. We’re responsive. We’re good to go! Now what?

Ok so now that you really do have a great website that’s ready to grow and looks great everywhere, you really are ready to get started on your journey towards internet success. Make sure that your website is officially submitted to Google via the Google Search Console and that you’ve also created and submitted a sitemap to help Google understand the structure of your website. Make sure also that your on-page SEO is tidy, realistic and appealing to your human prospects. All done? Let’s move on…

2 – Grow the content of your website. Become an amazing source of information about your industry and business…

This will be an ongoing process. The scale of your content can grow over time. If there is a particular service you provide, create an in-depth page of content about it. If there is a particular question that you are regularly asked by your customers, answer it in-depth via your website. Use your blog to keep people informed about developments within your industry or business.

In short, if there is something that can be said about your business or industry, say it on your website. After all, the information is probably already out there – better that people find the answers through the content on your website rather than someone else’s.

Where possible, use video clips and video content to help illustrate your content. Do you have a product that you can demonstrate via video? Do you feel that your prospects would benefit from an introduction to your business via video. Try to produce as much video content as possible that will be of value to your website’s visitor. Video content will keep people on your site longer, build trust, allow people to connect to your business and lower your bounce rate. Great for SEO.

Here’s a video opportunity that we took a clip of for our own website…

Try to encourage your visitors to share your content. Just ask them to do so and provide share buttons at the end of your articles.

2 – Promote your great web content on your social platforms and grow your audience

So now that you’re publishing great, useful content on your website, it’s time to start promoting it and driving traffic to it. Set up a Facebook business page, a YouTube channel, a Twitter account and post links on these platforms to your great web content. Remember, your Twitter audience may be different to your Facebook audience, so try to post links to your content with your respective social audiences in mind.

You can grow your audiences on social platforms simply by publishing regular, great content. You can also pay to boost your posts to any given demographic should you feel that your content is worth paying to promote.

Encourage quality links from others to your great web content…

By publishing great content which is of value to people, you will undoubtably gain good one-way links to your content from other websites. It’s a slow process, but quality links from high ranking and relevant websites are a real boost to your Google positions and credibility.

Writing reviews about your suppliers products or services is a good way to encourage links to your content. People like to link to positive reviews about themselves.

Persevere, Persevere, Persevere!

Perseverance is absolutely key when it comes to internet success. Keep growing your web content, your social audiences, your video content and your quality links and, given time, you’ll become a respected authority online, and your business will grow by reputation as a result.