Is a website with a pretty design enough?

After helping so many small business owners harness the internet to earn more money from the web I hear a lot of common things. The most common thing that people tell me is, "I already have a website". Whenever I get that response, I always ask the same question..."Are you getting business from your site?" The answer to this question is almost always a resounding, "NO" or "Not as much as I'd like".

Most designers are only concerned with creating a website that has nice graphics, a good layout and something to make the website cool. Here is the problem; you can have the prettiest, best laid out, coolest website in the world, but if you don't get visitors your website is not going to be profitable for you.

Search Engine Optimization, the great equalizer!

The internet is the ultimate way to level the playing field for all companies. With the internet, it is now possible to reach thousands of potential customers without a multimillion dollar advertising budget. Instead, all you need is to know exactly what you're doing.

The problem is that most small business owners don't have the time or the know-how to handle everything necessary to generate enough business online. Most people still have this belief that they can simply create a website and people are going to magically find your website and buy your products/services. The reality is that in order to get visitors to your page you can either buy traffic (expensive P.P.C., Content Marketing, Banner Ad Marketing, etc.) or you can develop organic traffic.

Organic traffic through search engines has changed the world. It has never been easier for people to find EXACTLY what they want within seconds. If you have a product or a service that people want, you can leverage those tools to get all the customers you can handle. In order to do that, you have to manage 3 things:

1. On-page optimization: This means identifying keywords that people use when they are ready to buy your product, encoding all of your pages so that the search engines know what keywords you are searching for and finally you have to ensure that your website is relevant for the keywords that are applicable you are optimizing for.
2. Off-page optimization: The second step to leverage search engines is to obtain importance. Every search engine has their own algorithm that they use to figure out which website is the most relevant to the keyword that you put into the search. The search engines send their robot "Spiders" to crawl your website. The search engines look for two things, your on-page optimization and how many other sites recommend your site. The way that other sites recommend you is by linking to you. The more links you have, and the higher the search engine ranks those links, the more important/relevant the search engine thinks your site is...so you get a higher ranking.
3. The last step to getting customers online is to capture your visitor's information and give them a reason to keep coming back. The majority of your visitors are going to look at your website the first time and leave. An average website will make most of it's sales between the 2nd and 8th visit to their website. In order to keep your visitors returning to your page, you have to give them a reason to give you their information so that you can keep in touch with them and then you have to keep giving them reasons to come back.

All of these steps may seem like a lot of work. That's because they are. However, it's business. If you do all of these steps the right way, you can easily transform your website from no results/not the results you want, into your primary revenue channel. To learn more about how Planet Whiz can help you with this process, get a FREE WEBSITE EVALUATION and learn how your site stacks up!

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