Make Your Web Site Work More
So You Can Work Less
By C.J.Hayden
Do you know how your web site fits into the overall marketing
strategy for your business? Do you have a strategy for your web site
as a marketing tool? If you're like many entrepreneurs I speak with,
you probably don't.
All over the world, small business owners are
spending thousands of dollars on building and maintaining web sites
without being able to answer one big question: What do you want your
web site to do?
Creating a web site without a marketing strategy
can be an expensive and time-consuming mistake. Here's an
illustration from the more familiar world of paper and postage.
Imagine that you hired a graphic designer, printed 5000 four-color
tri-fold brochures, and when the boxes arrived, you asked yourself,
"Gee, what shall I do with these?"
That scenario may sound a bit embarrassing as it
stands, but let's take it further. Suppose the first idea that
occurs to you is mailing your new brochure to a list of 500 names
you collected by exhibiting at a trade show. But then you realize
that you didn't design the brochure as a self- mailer -- all 6
panels are filled with graphics and copy.
To mail your brochure, you will now need 500
envelopes. Of course you want to use the ones printed with your
address and logo, but how much do those cost a piece? And do you
have 500 in stock? What will be the cost in money or time to get
envelopes printed, addressed, and stuffed? How long will all this
take? Was any of this in your budget when you had the brochures
printed?
The brochure example can tell us much about what
goes wrong in creating web sites. Many sites are constructed to be
simply electronic brochures. Entrepreneurs often get their sites
designed by sending their printed brochure to a web designer, and
saying, "Put this on the Web."
So here's what is wrong with that. If you want
your web site to attract traffic, your web site must be DESIGNED to
attract traffic.
You have a choice in designing your site and
integrating it with your overall marketing strategy. You can choose
to make your site an electronic brochure with no consideration of
how to attract visitors built into the design. If you do this, it
means that you must direct traffic to your site by other means --
advertise, promote, exhibit, speak, write, network, prospect, mail,
call, etc.
Unfortunately, most small business owners find
this out after the fact. They put up the site and then slowly
realize that no one is seeing it. So they start spending time and
money on banner ads, on-line malls, classifieds, postcards, bulk
email, posting articles, exchanging links, and more.
The alternative is to design your site to attract
traffic in the first place. If you're going to spend all the time
and money to build a web site, doesn't it make more sense to have
the site bring you customers rather than you having to bring
customers to the site?
To create a high-traffic web site, it must be
search-engine friendly. 85-90% of all web site traffic comes from
search engines. When a customer types in a keyword phrase you hope
will bring them to you, your site needs to be one of the top 10-30
results shown or that customer will never get to you. To earn top
positions in the major search engines, you or your web designer must
know the guidelines each engine uses to create its rankings, and
mold your site to meet them.
Some of these guidelines relate to the content of
your site, and how it is organized. Others have to do with the
technical details of how your site is constructed. If you don't want
to know these specifics, you'd better hire someone who does. That's
the problem with letting just anyone who calls themselves a web
designer create a site for you.
Looking at a designer's portfolio of completed
sites will tell you only a small part of what you need to know about
their abilities. Who wrote the content for those sites? Who designed
the page layout and navigation? Where did the graphics come from?
And here's the most important question: What did the designer do to
make those sites search-engine friendly?
It's a rare person who possesses the four-way
combination of design ability, technical expertise, marketing
know-how, and search engine savvy to create an attractive, useful
web site that will attract traffic AND generate paying customers.
You know which of these capabilities you already have, and what new
skills you're willing to learn. Make sure you hire people who have
the rest.
