So You've Built a Website. Now What?
Wayne Attwell - Senior Brand Strategist, Bold Horizon
So you've spent a few thousand dollars to build your new website and are pretty pleased with how it looks.
You may even have managed to squeeze a good deal out of the website designer and even saved a few dollars by spending 15 or 20 hours compiling and inputting your marketing blurb into the Content Management System (CMS).
Now all you have to do is sit back and wait for the visitors to stream to your great new website, right? Well in a perfect web world where no one else has a website, you may be right.
Unfortunately, in the online world, the famous saying from the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, "Build it and they will come" simply doesn't work.
If you put your website efforts into a 'brick and mortar' context, it's like building a brand new warehouse and showroom, filling them with some great products and putting a small A4 sign on the front door with just your company name.
In this scenario you don't tell anyone about the warehouse and showroom, neither do you advertise it to your target market or customer base - you simply sit in your office and wait for the rare passer-by to pop his head in the door out of curiosity. And if you're really lucky, the occasional visitor may actually find something they like and buy it.
Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Well that's exactly what you've done with your new website. Today, there are hundreds of millions of websites and thousands more are being added every day. There are so many websites out there that the chances of a qualified prospect finding your site are slimmer than a toothpick on a diet.
Sure you've emailed all your clients and told them to visit your new website. You've even sent an email to the names of prospects that never actually did business with you (BTW, that's called SPAMMING and it's illegal).
But they all already know about you. After all, they communicate and do business regularly with you; they have a copy of your brochure or catalogue, and may occasionally see your sales rep, if you have one.
One of the compelling arguments in favour of investing in a website (it is an investment, not an expense!) is that it enables you to reach NEW PROSPECTS, extending your influence into a wider target market.
It should drive incremental business and present your company to new prospects who otherwise would not have considered doing business with you. So how do you move your website from its current static position to one that actually generates a return and reaches a wider market?
The first thing you have to realise and ACCEPT is that you will have to invest some money to market your website. In the 'new warehouse and showroom' scenario earlier in this article, an astute business operator would allocate a marketing budget to promote the new facility and all the great products inside it.
It's the same thing with your website. The general rule of thumb is that you need to invest at least the cost of the initial website development in marketing it effectively. This web marketing budget doesn't need to be spent immediately, but it would most likely be spread over a 12-month period.
If you've had your website designed and built by one of the many low-cost website designers/HTML code-jockeys, you may be in bad shape. And if you've written and added the page content yourself it may be the kiss of death for your online marketing efforts.
Achieving measurable ongoing success for your website requires a range of marketing activities to be implemented. Here are the key ones:
Developing effective web marketing copy
Not only is well written and correctly structured marketing copy critical for capturing the attention of your website visitors but it is also a key element in achieving rankings on search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista etc.
The structure of web page copy is substantially different from copy written for other mediums, with careful use and placement of keywords, amount of copy on the page and keyword density crucial.
Even if you have a Content Management System for your website and wish to add and manage it yourself, you should at least have a professional web marketing agency review and edit your copy and structure it according to search engine requirements.
Creating appropriate Meta tags
The addition of carefully developed Meta tags to your website is essential to being indexed by the search engines. If you have added the web content yourself it is unlikely that any Meta tags will exist on your site.
Without these tags, your site is not likely to achieve any search rankings. A professional website marketing and search engine optimisation agency can help to identify the main keywords for your particular business and market and will develop effective Meta tags for your site.
Ongoing analysis of website activity and page statistics
You should have subscribed to a website analytics service when your site was developed. The information provided by this service is an important part of measuring the performance and effectiveness of your website from a number of perspectives.
Typically, it would detail how many unique visitors you have had to your site; how visitors found your site; how long they spent on it; what the most popular pages are; search phrases and words they used to find your website and a host of other valuable data.
Regular review and analysis of your web statistics data is essential to the ongoing improvement and effectiveness of the site and to ensure the best return on your investment.
Update your website regularly
Not only do search engines favour websites that are regularly updated, but so do the flesh and blood types that you will entice to your site by applying the techniques described earlier in this article.
The general rule of thumb is to change or add around 20% of your content every 6 months. This may seem like a major task, but it is really not hard to do.
You should review your page content from time to time, making subtle improvements to the text to reflect changes in your market or company. Add new pages or sections to the site, gradually expanding the information contained in it.
If you engage a web marketing firm to manage the ongoing refinement of your site, it will most likely also be reviewing and improving your keywords.
These activities have a two-fold benefit; your site is favoured by the search engines as it is 'fresh', and your site visitors will enjoy the new and expanded content.
One useful way to add fresh content is to write informative articles relating to your industry and to add them to your site. If you have a NEWS section it will also help keep your site 'fresh', but it does require someone to be responsible for writing the news articles and publishing them on the site.
There is nothing more irritating than visiting the NEWS section of a website and finding the latest article is 12 months old. In the online website world, old news is bad news!