Homestead Full Service

The Importance of a Good Website with Marketing – Full Service

These days having an online presence isn’t as simple as building a website and starting to get traffic to it. As people get more comfortable with shopping and finding local services online, the competition grows each day making it imperative that you set yourself up for success. Here are a few tips you will want to think about when starting to build your online business.

Design

When people come to your website you only have a few seconds to convince them to stay. When building your site or revamping it, here are some things to consider.

Start with a plan.  It’s easy to get lost in what you are trying to accomplish with your website. When thinking about the design, try to focus on the customer’s journey.

• When they come to your site can they easily find what they need?
• Which pages do they have to go to in order to convert into a customer?

Knowing how existing customers found you will help devise a good strategy for your site.

Have call-to-actions. When a visitor comes to your website, at first they aren’t going to know what to do. Having the right call to actions will help the person discover what to do next. Make sure you use things such as:

• “click here for more information”
• “check pricing”
• “sign up today”
• “call for a free quote”

The easier you make it for a visitor to find what they need, the greater chance you have in converting them to a customer.

Have relevant images. Don’t use default images from a template you choose when creating your website as people can tell if images are genuine or not. It’s always better to use an image that gives the message you are trying to convey.

• Take a good photo of yourself or employees for your about us page
• Have images of your products or specific services tailored to those pages

There are dozens of more design tips to make sure you set yourself up for success. Again, the most important note is to build the site for your customer, not based off what you think it should look like.

SEO

Once you have your online business up and running, it’s now time to start bring traffic to it. We often hear from people that they built their site, but nobody can find them. This is a common problem for a lot of small businesses, but can easily be corrected by using search engine optimization.

SEO, in a nutshell, is making sure search engines know what to rank you for and can trust that you are an expert in your field.

Make your site relevant. Search engines like Google use everything on your site to determine what your business is and what you should rank for. From your content down to image alt tags, your entire website is important for getting found online. This is why it’s important to talk about your products/services in depth, use appropriate images, and even update some backend data to give you the best chance at ranking. The more you can show you are the expert in your industry, the better you will start to rank.

Building trust. Chances are you have several competitors in your area that are also competing to be at the top of search engines. It sometimes isn’t enough to make your website relevant and you need to create backlinks. A backlink is getting another website online to post a link on their website that goes back to yours. This can be done through directories, articles, blogs, forums, social networks, etc... The more you can build the more search engines will trust your website and the quicker you will climb in rankings. This can be a time-consuming task and one should devote a few hours a week in order to make sure you are staying ahead of your competitors.

Let Us Do This For You

All of this may seem a little overwhelming to you and the last thing we want is for you to feel like you can’t succeed. Because of this Homestead has created the perfect product for those looking to get help in making sure their website is set up to convert visitors into customers as well as working on building up the SEO to drive traffic to your site.

Full Service

Design

Work one on one with your own professional designer to help build your vision. Our design team will:

• Have a welcome call to go over your business and design ideas for your site
• Build an initial website for you to review in 5-7 business days
• Complete a site review with you over the phone to discuss any revisions you’d like
• Complete a second site review with you over the phone to finalize your design and make any last updates
• Launch your website and make it live on your domain
• Complete a 30 – 45-minute walkthrough with you where they teach you how you can update and maintain your website.

During the design process, we make sure everything is covered that search engines and visitors want to see. From page layouts to call-to-actions, the number one goal is for your site to have the highest possible chance at converting a visitor to a customer. Your designer will cover many of these in depth with your during your initial call and build them into your website.

SEO

During the design phase of Full Service, you will also have a dedicated marketing manager who will work with you on building traffic to your website. This process involves:

• Initial welcome call to go over your business goals and who an ideal customer is.
• Keyword research to determine what people are typing into search engines to find you.
• Implementing the relevant keywords and phrases into your website
• Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
• H1 Tags
• Content Density
• Monthly backlinking to start moving your website up in rankings

SEO can be an ongoing task so it’s important that we continue to work on your site and build trust to get you to the top of the search engines. Your dedicated marketing manager will work with you closely during the entire process and even go over monthly progress so you know where you stand. A marketing portal will be set up for you so you can also view your traffic and rankings anytime.

Take the guesswork out of growing your online business and let us help get you to where you need to be. You are the expert in your industry. Let us be the expert in helping people find you.

Article provided by Chris F.
Chris joined Homestead in 2008 as a phone agent. In 2009 he moved to the Design Services department and has been specializing in SEO since then.