Whitepaper - Effective Websites

by Phil Baddock, Director Search Marketing, Salsa Internet

A new website.... "if you build it, they will come"…..not!

Building an effective and successful online website for a company involves more than just hanging out your electronic shingle on the internet, and waiting for the world of potential customers to beat a path to your door!  It’s about more than just pretty graphic design (although that’s important), and it’s not just creation of an internet brochure.

In this White Paper, we’ll give you a overview of the most important issues you need to think about when building your new website including:

Through employing these principles Salsa has observed up to a 400% increase in user visits, and sales on it’s own and on key clients’ websites.

1. Communicating your key message

Creating a new internet site is much like any other marketing activity you seek to undertake.   The most important things to think about are:

• Who is your target audience? and;
• When visiting your site, what are they trying to achieve? (I.e. what are their goals and how can you help them achieve them?)
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For example, if you are a company who sells vacuum cleaners, you may be tempted to emphasise vacuum cleaner features rather than the benefits which clients are seeking:

Consider moving to a benefit based message >>>> 

So the first cab off the rank when planning your new website, is to put yourself in your customer or reader’s shoes and ask yourself “What’s in it for me”?  Why should they care about what you have to offer?  Make sure that your message is tailored to address these concerns.

There are 2 key ways you need to tailor your new website to achieve this.   Firstly, ensure that your page structure and wording reflect your key benefits to clients or users, and secondly, ensure that the site images and graphics also help re-enforce and communicate these key messages to your audience.

It’s also worth getting an independent perspective or two about how well your site supports a purchase decision - you'll often pickup good insights from this.  At Salsa Internet, we spend time working with clients to help provide this independent perspective to ensure they are getting their message across in the most effective way.

2. The importance of good graphic design

It’s more than just a fancy coat of paint!

Have you ever noticed that even though you may not have a creative bone in your body, you immediately, within the space of 2 or 3 seconds, form a distinct and lasting impression of the quality of a company’s website…..and perhaps less consciously an impression of how professional they are - based on the site look and feel.  High quality graphic design doesn’t have to cost a fortune. 

More experienced and reputable web development companies, have access to professional graphic designers who can create something visually appealing and attractive with only a few hours of effort.    Consider the following 2 designs by vacuum cleaner companies who are competing side by side on the web for your business:

Both firms have clearly spent quite a bit of time and effort building their websites, and yet one is immediately more impactful than the other simply through a little careful use of professional graphic design and thought regarding the content to be displayed (I’ll let you decide which one!).

Ensure that complementing your professional look and feel, is a focus on delivering key information which a customer may be seeking to answer their most common pre-purchase questions or concerns.  If you don't do this, the money invested in a professional design may be wasted.

3. How to create and cost effectively manage a web site

When setting up a new website, a key challenge is obtaining high quality after-sales support and maintenance of your website, after the initial setup is complete.   Your organisation is unlikely to be static.  You’ll have new activities, run new marketing campaigns & promotions, and have special offers from time to time.  You need to make sure that your website can go on this journey with you to continually reflect the current state of your organisation.   If you've never owned a website before, be careful to take time and understand how much subsequent modifications and changes to your website will cost after it's created.  Some ways to keep your costs down and ongoing manageability up:

To save money on graphic design - consider a pre-existing web template

There are hundreds of sample graphic designs and templates / layouts which can be used to offer a pre-defined graphical layout and look and feel available from companies such as http://templatemonster.com for as little as US$50.   Salsa or other firms can help you integrate these designs into your new website.  You will still need to set aside some money to fund the tailoring of these standardised templates for your organisation (depending on how much divergence from the standard template you are seeking), but this is a good way to achieve a highly professional graphic design for a very modest price.  

For clients on an extreme budget, Salsa Internet offer visually appealing template based websites fully tailored to match your company logo and content for as little as $2000.

An important issue to consider is which parts of your site are likely to change often and try to make more extensive use of text in these areas.  The extent to which you incorporate highly graphical elements into your website design, will affect the effort required to make significant changes in future (text can be easily altered, but changing graphical layouts adds effort).  

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use graphic design, but consider which parts of your website are likely to be subject to regular change, and ensure the right balance of graphic design and text elements are used accordingly.

Ongoing updates to your site – keeping things “fresh”

In recently years, a new type of web development tool called a “Content Management System” has become much more affordable and accessible to those creating a new website.   These tools allow non-technical users to easily maintain the pages and content of your site without having to involve a technical person.   They achieve this by using simple page editing software similar to MS Word called a “WYSIWYG” editor (WYSIWYG stands for ‘what you see is what you get’).  They make the task of making changes and updates to your website vastly easier than was previously the case. 

Many website development companies such as  Salsa, now offer these tools as a standard part of every client website built so that clients have the flexibility of making changes to their website themselves.   For those who aren’t inclined to be performing updates to their websites, it is vital to ensure that your ongoing support arrangements with your website development partner includes a provision for updates to your site as part of their support service. 

(Salsa Internet bundle 1 hour of support or website updates each month as part of the standard customer hosting fees).

4. How to promote your web site to help you get found online

So you’ve built your shiny new website, and you’re ready to get the word out.  Many businesses add their web address to their business card, and that’s about where it ends.  It is vitally important that once your new website is up and running, that you leverage this considerable marketing investment in order to make sure that it can be easily found by your target audience.    

To achieve this, you’ll need to focus on:

• Efforts to proactively promote your website to clients and prospects  (via both online and offline methods) and;
• Ensuring your new website has been properly structured to ensure that search engines display your website prominently in their free search results

First, let’s take a look at ways of promoting your new website.  Many techniques are available to new website owners to take a proactive approach to promotion of their website.  Consider the following: 

Tell your existing clients about it!

Your existing customers are people you have already worked hard to build a relationship with.   If they know you have a website, they can then use your website to look up your contact details, find out the latest information about promotions you’re running, read more about your products or services.   It’s worth contacting them proactively to tell them about it.  

Include your web address on your existing marketing materials

In addition to adding your website to your business cards, you should also add your “URL” (a.k.a. your website address) to your company letter head, brochures, fax templates, signage, invoices and any other materials you use to communicate with clients and suppliers.

Search Engine Marketing – Google, Yahoo and MSN

Recently, Google, Yahoo and MSN have all created a new form of website marketing – called “Pay Per Click” advertising which can deliver fantastic results for some clients in driving prospective customers to their new website.   Many people’s first instinct is to write these off thinking “My customers don’t come from the internet”.  This may be true, but that’s exactly why you are setting up an internet site(!)  .....so that those searching for similar products and services to the ones you offer can find your business.

Search engines have two types of results which are displayed when a user searches.  There are free search results, and Pay Per Click advertising results shown in blue and pink respectively on the image shown (from Google.com).

Pay per click advertising, allows  display of your ads (at no cost), however if a user clicks on your advertisement and visits your website then you pay a fee for this visit.  

How much you pay is governed by an auction system where you “bid” for particular search phrases or keywords that users may be looking for on the search engine.  The more you bid, the higher in the list of advertisements your ad appears.  

For example, if you sell vacuum cleaners you might bid $0.50 a click for terms such as “vacuum cleaner”, or “hoover”.  You only pay the $0.50 if they click on your ad which takes them to your website. 

If the user searches for some other terms, your ad is not displayed.  There are some key benefits of this system including:

• You get a lot of exposure of your advertisement for free as people aren’t going to click on the ad each time it’s displayed (you could however expect many displays of your ad for every time a user clicks through although if your are in a specialist / niche business then results may be much better).
• Because the user was searching for keywords or search phrases that are so highly relevant to your products and services, if they click on your ad, they are likely to be a well targeted potential client – and because the user is searching on these keywords already, the ads displayed are more useful to users and therefore they are more likely to look at them than in other forms of advertising.
• You can tightly control your ad spend with a budget of as little as $5 per month or up to thousands of dollars per day depending on how aggressively you want to promote your new website.

Bottom line: Pay Per Click marketing delivers fantastic results, and should be seriously considered in your website marketing efforts. 

Salsa can help you get started on this route for a very modest cost.  Aside from paid search engine marketing, getting your website ranked well in the free search engine listings is very important as this is where most users are looking for content (and clicking!) when they are searching the web.

5. How to ensure your website is designed to be found by others

There is no better way to promote your site that achieving a high ranking in the "free listings" on the search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN and their various local Australian equivalents (Ninemsn, Google.com.au, Yahoo.com.au).  The amount of search traffic on these sites is huge and clicks on your site are completely free when users find your site on these search engines in the free search results (shown in blue in the image above).  

Here are some of the most important factors in helping your website be found by and achieve a high ranking on these search engine websites:

Efficient use of “Meta Tags” and HTML Title tags

Meta tags are short descriptive words that are embedded into the HTML code of your web page by your website designer and are used to describe each page on your website so that the search engines can understand what your site is about.  Ensure you utilise a short, succinct statement about what your business does in this area, and ensure that you make at least 2 uses of the important keywords that users are likely to search on when looking for your business. Making sure that the <title> tags describing each page, are appropriate worded helps enormously too (well structured descriptive title tags unique to each page are one of the most important factor in SEO for Google).   A search on site:yoursite.com and then reviewing the links in blue will show you what your page title tags are currently - you want to avoid duplicate titles on each page, and include your important keywords early in the title - for example "Vacuum Cleaner Sales & Repairs, by Bob's Vacuums, Melbourne, Australia" ensuring you can be found by your keywords, your business name, and your location.

Text headings, buttons and menu links

Using graphical buttons on your site is important for visual appeal.  It’s also important however that the main navigation buttons pointing to the key pages on your website be indexable by the search engines.   To achieve this, ensure that there is a text version of these links somewhere on your homepage. 

Ensure your menu items have titles that are also themselves relevant keywords, so in the previous example you might use menu links with words like:  “Vacuum Cleaners”, “Cleaning Supplies”, “Dust Collectors” etc. 

Make sure that your home page also includes page content that contains the most important keywords that you want to be indexed by search engines.   Try to use your important keywords near both the beginning and end of the page.

Pages contain relevant, useful content and keywords

Pages containing a substantial body of useful content (like this whitepaper!) have a higher chance of being indexed well by search engines, under a broader group of keywords and search terms.

Think about ensuring that the sorts of keywords that users would search for to find your product and service, are used numerous times on these content pages.  By ensuring that the content is useful, informative and relevant to users, it will increase the chance that others will link to your page, and find your page through the popular search engines.

The power of weblinks

Google and other search engines use links where other websites point to / link to  your website as an important factor in weighting how highly your page ranks on their search index.   Each link that another website contains that points to your site, is counted as a vote of its popularity on the internet.   What this means is that if you can convince others (business partners, suppliers, or industry directory sites) to setup a link from their website that points to your site, then it will increase your ranking in the free search results of the search engines. 

Links to your page from a website that itself has a high ranking, has an even stronger weighting.   Searching on link:www.yoursitename.com.au on Google, will show you which websites link to your website homepage.   You can try this with your website to see how effective you’ve been in convincing others to link to you.   Avoid gratuitious exchanging of links with others however, as Google has recognised this as an artificial practice, and doesn't give weight to links gained via reciprocal linking, or link exchanges.

6. Measuring your success with Google Analytics

After all that effort in getting a website cost effectively built, setup, marketed and indexed on the search engines, the logical question arises – “So how do I know if this is working?”.  There are a few important ways to measure your website success.  

Google provide a free toolset called Google Analytics ” to measure and monitor how many visitors you are getting to your website and from what sources. Content Management Systems like the one used by Salsa Internet to create client sites, also provide this reporting capability, although Google Analytics is a premium service at the right price (it's free!).   Analytics can also measure how many people contact you via your contact form, or visit certain pages, or click on certain links - the amount of useful information available through Google Analytics, makes this a must have for the average website owner.

Doing things like placing a drop down question on your “Contact Us” form asking “Where did you hear about us” will also help you track the source of your new website inquiries.

In summary

The internet is a powerful medium for attracting and retaining customers and users to your organisation via your new website .   As you can see there are multiple issues involved with ensuring your new website will be a success, however the good news is that this is readily achievable with some careful planning and execution.