What’s the most important piece of your business’s secure web presence? Your website, of course. Technically speaking, your “web presence” is just the location of your website on the worldwide web, where your business is represented. But in reality it’s much more than that.
An accurate and wide reaching web presence can help drive business. At Web Design by Knight, our goal is provide our clients with a simple, stress-free, secure web presence. Let’s review the elements involved.
Website
Think of your website as your hub. It’s key to your web presence. Creating a secure website requires careful planning and goal setting. Most business owners want to do three things:
Create an Online Web Presence
Creating an online presence is the most important reason for creating a website. This means building a site that includes your business information, highlights what makes you special, and gives consumers a way to contact you.
Capture Leads
As your web presence grows it can become a community for your clients. Connect with potential consumers and find a way to continue marketing to them.
Differentiate Their Business
Making your business stand out takes a more advanced strategy. Maintaining a blog that portrays your thoughts and insights can help develop your secure web presence and stand out to consumers.
The website needs to be written in a way that will be easy to find. This includes easily readable text. It also includes tags and metadata that will help Google find you in search. These elements together create a secure web presence that is easy to read and rich in search engine optimization (SEO).
Homepage
The homepage will generally be the initial point of contact with your consumers. Consumers will make a split-second decision on whether they’ll stay to learn more or go to a competitor. Don’t lose them at the start. A good homepage will answer the questions “What do you do?” and “Why should I trust you?”
About Page
This page should make an impact and impress your consumers. Explain exactly what your company does, in-depth. Customers want to know who you are, why you do what you do, and what makes you special.
Contact Page
This page should make it easy for clients to contact you. Directions should me simple and clear. Make sure it outlines your address, phone number, email address, and any other way someone can reach you. You might even want to include a Google Map with directions to your store or office.
These three pages, homepage, about page and contact page, create a basic online presence. If you want to set your business apart from everyone else, the best way to do that is to create a company blog.
Blog
Another component of your web presence is a blog. A blog ensures that there is constantly fresh material being loaded onto the site. This in turn keeps the site properly indexed in search engines, helping to boost search results.
Sometimes business owners shy away from blogs. Why is a blog important? For one, it shows that you know what you’re talking about. It helps you identify you and your business as an expert or unique.
Secondly, it gives readers, and Google, a reason to come back to your site. The more contact you have with consumers, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Thirdly, Google indexes and searches all new pages you add to your website. Ideally you want to keep Google coming back to index more words for SEO so you can rank higher
Consumers these days want more than just a product description. They want to know how to use your product, examples of interesting things people are doing, and how you can make their life easier.
Newsletter
It’s here that we begin building leads from your website’s visitors. Getting consumers to sign up for your email list means you no longer have to wait for them to come to you. You can offer your core consumers specials and keep them up to date on new products or changes.
Social Media Accounts
When you’re building an online web presence, the most important aspect is your website. It’s your business hub and your first impression. In addition, social media accounts can and should point consumers to your website.
Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are three sites your business needs to be active on if you want to maximize your web presence. Social media posts are a great way to stay connected with current, future and past clients. Are you using the right elements to maximize your website’s effectiveness?
Conclusion
By definition, a website is the location on the web where a business is represented. But your web presence is about all the elements working together. For your business, it is important that you can be found at many locations on the web. A strong web presence can make that happen. A wide reaching web presence can also help drive business, even if your primary services are conducted offline.
At Web Design by Knight, we can utilize all of the above methods and others to ensure that your business has an effective web presence that is easily found by the clients and customers.