Is your website really working for you?

In reality almost 99% of websites fail to provide a return on investment. The reason behind this, commonly, is that insufficient planning was done before the website was designed.

Planning is the most important aspect to success. In its simplest from you need to determine:

• What do I offer?
• Who will want what I offer?
• Why would someone choose my offering?
• When do people need what I offer?
• Where can I offer my goods / services

If you can answer these basic questions your website design and content will be targeted to the right target audience.

For example let’s apply this simple planning exercise for a fictional local builder called “Blogg & Son”.

Blog & Son operate a small building firm in Cirencester. They hoped having a website would attract more business. Johnny, the son has a friend that knows a thing or two about websites as he did one for his uncle’s bridge club. They acquire the domain name www.bloggandson.com and Johnny’s friend puts together a 4-page website.

The website has been live for 2 years and it has never generated a lead and has been pretty much forgotten about.

This is very common, with three web pages for every single person on the planet, website competition is fierce and that is why planning is very important. We meet clients in this position daily especially now that times are harder when it is essential to win new business.

Staying with the scenario we will now do some basic planning for Blogg & Son using the above simple questions.

What do I offer?

• Professional building service
• Home extensions
• Home conversions
• Conservatories

Who will want what I offer

• Adults 25+

Why would someone choose my offering?

• Local
• Quality
• Service
• Experience - 25 years in business
• Many references

When do people need what I offer?

• Aspirational - need more space or adapt space to suit our lives
  

Where can I offer my goods / services

• 25 miles of Cirencester

Armed with these few simple facts we can now plan to redesign the website more effectively.

Domain name we will retain the domain name but we will acquire a new one focused on what they do and where they do it – www.cirencester_builders.co.uk

Why? When someone is searching for a local service they are most likely to search for “town” and “Service”. Therefore, “Cirencester Builders” matches this pattern and is more likely to be used in a search than a trade name such as “Blogg & Son”. A .co.uk is use as this will give the website a higher ranking for searches in the UK.

We are going to use “cirenester builders” in a few strategic places on the website. This will search engines to identify with the content and position the website for relevant searches. The first place is in the page title together with “what do I offer” and “Where can I offer my goods / services”


Page title – “Cirencester builders, local professional building services, Home extensions, Home conversions and Conservatories”.

This title will be read by search engines and is usually what it returns as the headline in search results. Saying what you do and where you do it helps considerably to position your business for the right searches.

Now we can focus on the content to bring everything together. Taking “who will what I offer” question we determined that we are targeting adults of any age above 25. As such our content needs to be universally appealing with a clean design that is easy to read. We will also consolidate our research to incorporate the key messages:

Cirencester Builders are professional builders delivering a high quality services for home extensions, Home conversions and Conservatories within Cirencester and the local area.

Our total commitment to service and quality ensures that your aspirations for your home are met or exceeded. With over 25 years of experience our family business has grown and we have many examples and references pertaining to our building services.

Finally we will create a standards compliant website so that search engines will not penalise our website for poor quality.

Of course the given scenario is simple. But poorly planned websites form the majority of the trillions of pages on the Internet that will never be found in context to your business.

For more complex markets professional marketing will help considerably to position your business correctly to attract the right (qualified) visitors to your website.

Talk to us about marketing planning we have both Internet and traditional marketing expertise to get the right message to the right person at the right time. You can view a sample mini-marketing plan here.