Marcus in Daltons Business Magazine

Your website is often the first encounter customers will have with your business. So even if you have a brilliant business, you need a decent website to back it up.

Yet a recent survey of 200 small businesses by website software company Mediasurface found that 60% feel their website does not match their company brand.

So how do you take your website to the next level and get it noticed above the competition?

Mike Cogan is director of IT consultancy Equinus. He says you must put yourself in your customers’ shoes and look at your site from their point of view. Better still, take a couple of trusted clients out for a coffee and ask them to be unashamedly blunt about what they like and, more importantly, what they don’t like, about your website.

“Also look at what your competitors do well online and what you like about some of your favourite websites. They don’t have to be in your sector, any good website might have elements you could copy,” he says.

Many small business websites are ‘static’, with a limited number of pages and no way for visitors to interact with the site. This amounts to simply putting the company brochure online.

The problem with this basic type of website is that it doesn’t take full advantage of the technology available. Why not make your list of products or services searchable, says Cogan.

This can be done by adding a content management system (CMS). This will allow you to upload images, prices and product information onto your site. It will also let your customers search the site.

Cogan recommends a CMS called Squiz. But a full Squiz package, including technical support, costs around £25,000, so you may need some cheaper options.

Robin Porter owns web design company Arpey Internet. He says a more basic but more affordable CMS option for smaller businesses is a software package called Macromedia Contribute, which costs around £100.

If you want your customers to be able to buy things through your site, you need e-commerce software. AmenWorld offers an e-shop package for as little as £9.99 per month, which will get you up and selling on the internet quickly and easily.

If you really want to impress your customers, add a video or blog to your site. Porter reckons these will create an extra way to interact with visitors that will keep them coming back for more.

This isn’t as pricey as you might think. The success of video-sharing websites like YouTube means that for many people internet video is now part of everyday life. And because videos can be hosted on these sites, they are very cheap to build in.

Porter says videos can be a great way to demonstrate products. He recently worked with a company that manufactures protectors for boat propellers. The firm has now put a five-minute video on the company website to show customers how the protector works.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video could be worth a
thousand more,” he says.

Video can also be used to keep a visitor at your website for longer or to build up credibility with customers. For example, at online eating out guide Sugarvine, sales director Paul Williams suggests a restaurant could include a series of short video clips of their chef preparing meals.

Blogs can also give a website a human touch. A fashion retailer, for instance, could use an online journal to discuss the latest trends. A financial consultant could muse about the implications of the Northern Rock saga or the latest interest rate rise.

The web is full of free blogging software that, according to Porter, can be configured to run from a website for about £200.

But be warned – it’s hard work. Drew Griffiths, a director at design agency eMosaic, says that once you start a blog or news section, you must be ready to keep it up to date. A site where the last blog entry is six months old will look stagnant – and you don’t want people thinking the same about your business.

“A website must be treated like another member of staff. You need to keep it involved and provide it with ongoing development,” he says.

You also need to get your site to be found by search engines, like Google and Yahoo. Marcus Green, managing director at Toolkit Websites, says: “A lot of people start their search for a service or product at Google.”

There are two ways to approach this. Either structure your site around how search engines work or bid for specific keywords or phrases so you appear high on the sponsored links rankings.

The former method is known as search engine optimisation. The SEO approach involves links to other websites, creating lots of fresh content and the constant repetition of keywords. But it is a complex practice that Green says will be beyond most small businesses.

“There’s a myth about SEO being free, but it actually requires an enormous amount of work to get right,” he says. Much better to concentrate on bidding for a number of key terms, says Green.

This approach is called pay-per-click. You pay an agreed amount – anything from one pence upwards – every time someone clicks through to your website from a search engine.

Green advises companies to be exact about the search terms they pursue. Try and bid for the term ‘yoga’ and there will be thousands of people after the same word but if you bid for ‘small yoga retreat in East Yorkshire’ you should have much less competition.

“And the more specific a term a person clicks on, the more serious they are about buying the product,” says Green.

You can read the full article here