Online Marketing 1-2-3, Part 1 - the Website

by Bob Stovall

Online Marketing 1-2-3 is a simplified process to determine if your online marketing strategy meets your minimum expectations for success in your marketplace. If these three basic building blocks are not in place, all other efforts are not likely to produce the results you have in mind – more traffic, more leads, more sales.

Over the next few months, we'll have a look at each of these building blocks. At the end, you'll have a good idea of what needs to be done to assure your success in the future where most of your prospects have lived digital lives from birth.

Whether custom designed, built using a Content Management System or other templating system, whether a traditional static website or a dynamic one that is updated regularly, whether it is a blog or has a blog added on, your website is the foundation of your Online Marketing System.

Your website is where people land when coming in from a web search, a printed URL, signs, emails or your social networking.

It is their first real impression of your business. Making a good first impression, acquiring leads and supplying the info your prospects need to make a buying decision are the goals of your website.

You do that by by addressing visitor's issues. When it comes to buying a home, there are a plethora of potential issues to be addresses. Lack of familiarity with your product, lifestyle misperception left by years of misinformation, resistance to change are just a few.

Then there are the perennials, such as insufficient money for a down payment, less than stellar credit, etc.

The first group need to be overcome by information, education and persuasion. The perennials call for creative solutions.

Most people like to buy – but hate being sold. Your website needs to make it easy for those who want to buy to do so. And it needs to ease the prospects transitions from "looker" to "buyer" by making the process as simple as possible.

When designing a website for a business, my goal is to keep it as simple as possible. Add only what is needed to provide the necessary services or information. Use simple, easy-to-follow navigation.

Images, audios and videos should be used to add value to the visitor's experience – never just to display your technical savvy or because someone told you that you need them. Out of context images, audios and videos will do your more harm than good.

Remember these two tenets of designing a website:

1. The only reason my web site exists is to solve my customers' problems.
2. What problems does the page I'm looking at solve?

If a web page fails to meet either of these two tenets, it is probably better to drop it in favor of pages that do.

There are three stages to building a website - 3 "P"s:

1. Planning
2. Production
3. Promotion

Many websites – and almost all amateur-produced sites – are built using only the 2nd "P" (Production). A business owner decides to build a website, hires someone of limited experience, sends over some pictures and the "website designer" builds the site by grabbing text from other websites, inserts the images and send s the bill.

Voila! A website is born!

But without the Planning and Promotion stages, the website fails to product the desired results and is soon forgotten about except when someone asks the owner if they have a website. Their answer is "Yes, but we just threw it up there and it's not doing much for us." I am constantly amazed how many times I hear this when talking to owners of local businesses.

If your website isn't performing up to or exceeding your initial expectations, it's time to scrap it and replace it with one that will.

Let's take each of the three "P"s with the goal being that you can then tell if your "web designer" is actually taking your project seriously or just "flying by the seat of his or her pants" in pursuit of a paycheck.

Planning

What are your goals for the website?

Do you want to get more leads? Sell more homes? Build a mailing list?

It's OK to answer "yes" to all of them, but each has it's own requirements for success. And proper planning of the website will increase the odds in your favor.

If you want more leads, the site will need a method of getting interested prospects to give you some personal information, incentivize them to stop in to your location or both.

If you want to sell more homes, (which is also the end goal of the other goals) you will need to effectively convey your company's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and convince the ones that have already made a buying decision that you are the one they want to buy from.

If our goal is just to build a mailing list to mine later with offers in exchange for more information, you'll need a way to collect the initial data (name and email address) and add them to your list.

When building any list that will require emailing the prospect, you will need software (or a service) capable of delivering your message in compliance with the law. Failure to do this will result in likely failure of your email campaign and could expose you to legal liability.

The next step in planning your website is to determine what pages are necessary to convey your message in an orderly, easy-to-navigate way.

The only two pages of a website that are absolutely necessary are a home page and a contact information page. A privacy page is absolutely necessary if you are collecting any data on the site.

Other pages can be built for other purposes as outlined in the "two tenets of web design" outlined above. Page may also be built for SEO purposes with the two tenets in mind. We'll get into that a little later.

Advanced planning of what pages will be on your site and what those pages will contain helps you focus on the type of content that creates a cohesive presentation and helps draw the audience that can best help your reach the goals you have set.

When designing a site for a client, I start by creating an Information Architecture map that graphically illustrates the placement of pages on the site. In addition to helping us produce quality pages and eliminate superfluous ones, the map also provides a guide to the navigation of the site. It exposes chokepoints and poor navigation paths before the site goes live and pages are already indexed.

Renaming pages and changing navigation after the fact can be quite expensive as redirects have to be created and tested for virtually every change, a time-consuming process.

Get the planning part right before you start to produce and you'll end up with a higher quality user experience, better search engine optimization (SEO), more fluid and easy-to-use navigation and a site that can be expanded and updated in the future without destroying your search engine ranking.

Lastly in the planning process, you and your designer should decide whether you will be creating a static "brochure" type site or a dynamic, growing website built to improve your search engine ranking for different keyword combinations over time.

This is an important decision. For manufacturers, the static version, updated annually with new models may be the better choice. Add a blog onto this type of site and you have your cake and eat it, too. The blog is used for news, updates and items of general interest that popup throughout the year.

Blogs, especially self-hosted WordPress blogs, are search engine magnets. Building a site using WordPress software on your own hosting solution can really help with SEO if the blog is updated on a regular basis.

The pages function of WordPress provides you with the opportunity to create static pages with the software that easy to update. You can even designate one of those pages as the home page of the site, taking care to not create duplicate navigation and providing a simple means to access the updating content (posts) of the site.

We can take care of this for you, or you can do it yourself with a little time and knowledge.

Production

Once you've completed the Planning phase, which can take anywhere from several hours to several days or even weeks if the project is a large one, you can begin production.

In the production phase, you take to plan you put together during planning and turn it into a collection of web pages that make up your website.

I'd like take a paragraph or two here to clear up an object of confusion that seems to persist.

Website vs. Blog

A website and a blog are both websites. What makes a blog (short for 'weblog') a blog is that it's information is posted and arranged for viewing in reverse chronological order. That is the newest content appears first.

Blogging software is set up to arrange the content in this order and to allow flexible options in how the information appears. Blog software allows content to be quickly and easily placed in categories (in fact, a single piece of content can be place in multiple categories) and navigation is updated automatically.

But a blog is still a website and modern blogging software can do a remarkable job of displaying a mixture of static and dynamic content.

By it's nature, blogging software eases the job of creating content that will rank well with search engines over multiple keywords. A static site can do this too, but maintaining logical navigation over time is more difficult and more expensive.

WordPress has long been our blogging software of choice, but any blogging software that can be installed on your own domain is suitable for business use.

And virtually any business can benefit from using it.

DIY vs. Hire a Web Designer

If your business is itself a website, you can do it yourself. If the website is a marketing tool of your business, you should hire a web designer. No matter what the web designer costs, he or she will be less costly than doing it yourself. You should be working on your business, not your website.

What to watch out for

As your website is being developed (or as you are reviewing your current website), be on the lookout for the obvious signs that your developer knows what they are doing – or doesn't and should be immediately fired and replaced (don't fool around with an unknowledgeable web developer – it will cost you dearly in the long run in time, treasure and lost opportunity).

As you review your website, look for these items:

Page Title (the bar at the top of your web browser)

The page title should be a close match for the H1 Tag (page headline) and for the keywords and description tag. Close match, not necessarily EXACT match. They should also be an accurate description of the contents of the page.

The keyword (or keyphrase) should also appear two or three times within the content of the page

One more thing to look for

If your developer is building your website or blog in WordPress, Joomla! Or any other Content Management System (and there are hundreds of great reasons to do so), check the URL as it appears in the address bar of your browser.

If it looks like this, request that your developer use Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs and don't take no for an answer. It is critically important to your SEO. I SEF URLs cannot be used or created, move to another system. This is not good:

The URL doesn't have a descriptive filename for the page. The search engines have gotten better about this over the past few years, but why would want a URL that looks like this, rather then more Search Engine friendly and MUCH more easy to remember:

Why all the concern about tags, headlines, filename and the like?

When Google, Bing, Yahoo or any search engine scans your web page, they are indexing the page and will try to match your page with specific search requests to give their searcher the best information possible. If your tags and content don't match or are incomplete, the Search Engines will direct their searcher to a page that does, figuring it has content more valuable to the search terms.

In other words, match the page content to the title, the the page filename, to the headline to the description and ultimately to the keyword or phrase used by the person doing the searching for a high quality match – THAT is SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in a nutshell.

I'm not going to tell you how to design your site or what it should look like. I will tell you that the content and SEO are far more important than the look and feel. But a well–designed website that is attractive will appeal more to your visitors than one that is a visual patchwork.

Promotion

So your website is finally done and live. Now just sit back and watch the business roll in. WRONG!

That may have been the case in 1996 when the web was just starting out, but it sure isn't the case now.

The key to getting business from your website is traffic. You can't to someone who doesn't know you exist.

Getting targeted traffic is simple but devilishly difficult undertaking. It requires persistent marketing effort and the flexibility to change and adapt as the markets and technologies change.

Climbing up on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for competitive keywords can be time consuming and expensive proposition, but it can payoff big time, especially if your product is a big ticket, big profit item.

It can also payoff handsomely if you are a high search volume, high profit business. 82% of home purchase begin on the 'Net. There's your high search volume. If your profit expectation per unit is also high, it's a good bet that hiring a professional to boost your SERP ranking will payoff over time.

Some web marketing gurus will tell you that using SEO provides you with "free" traffic. You may not pay Google for the traffic from SEO, but if you really want it to work for you, you WILL pay a professional on an ongoing basis to get you where you want to be and to keep you there.

You can also use Pay-per-Click (PPC) advertising to drive traffic to your site, but again I'd recommend getting a pro to help or you may end up paying thousands of dollars per month with little to show for it. A well-designed PPC campaign is one with the lowest possible cost per click that produces results. A 10% conversion on 100 clicks will cost you a LOT less than a 1% conversion on 1,000 clicks.

Next month we're going to cover the subject of Email Marketing, what it can do for you and how you should use it. And in the final part of this little trilogy, we'll cover the hot topic of Social Networking and how to use it in your business.

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"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, just wait until you hire an amateur." ~ Red Adair

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Read more in the posts on Bob's the Cutting Edge blog at MHMSM.com