Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales
Secret #2 – Get Found
Read the previous website design secret – Get Specific
Most websites don’t work, i.e. don’t contribute sales to your business. In this series of seven blog posts – Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales, you will learn how to change that and make your website a sales machine for your business.
Each post will contain a video and text for you to read and a downloadable workbook for you to take notes and use to improve your own website.
Website design secrets: Number two is to Get Found: give people things to find, use the right keywords and DON’T try to “scheme” Google!
There are still a lot of SEO myths around and people attempting to “game the system” to “trick” Google into giving their sites a high ranking in the Search Engines. Nothing could be more counter-productive, stupid, in fact! It always amazes me that individuals or small SEO specialists believe that they can “outsmart” Google – a company that employs more than 30,000 of the smartest people on the planet! As a result, there are a large number of “bogus experts” in the industry, that keep promulgating a variety of myths around SEO – what you need to do, what you should avoid and what Google are up to.
Remember what Google wants…
Google’s business model is to return the most relevant search results so people keep using them to search online. Google is very good at correctly assessing the most relevant websites and have hundreds of criteria to determine their rankings.
There is no and never was a magic bullet! The answer is to have a well-rounded website built on a best practice code base that offers the content your users are searching for in an interesting and engaging way.
Working in line with Google’s goals of providing excellent search results to satisfy searchers will work better than spending on those unfounded promises.
The solution, in fact, is much simpler than that. Take a look at what Google publishes for everyone to see – check their best practices and follow their guidelines. Magic, it works! You will also have the assurance to be safe from being penalized or worse, blacklisted by this leading search engine if you focus on giving quality content to the internet community. There’s nothing better than just sticking to the SEO best principles!
The secret to getting to No. 1 on Google, is that there is NO secret and NO guarantee!
Keywords
The right (i.e relevant to your content and audience) keywords are important and there are a few places where they should be added to get maximum value. They should, however, not be sprinkled randomly and ad-nauseum throughout your website or pages. That practice is called “keyword stuffing” and can result in a penalty from Google, which results in your page being well outside the top 100 ranking sites for that desired keyword.
Here is where your top / most important keyword should be:
- In your main URL if possible (www.keyword.com.au would be best or www.keyword.businessname.com.au)
- In your page URL or blog post URL (www.businessname.com.au/keyword)
- In your page title (known in “technical terms” as the “title tag”)
- In your content (but no more than 2-3 times in the opening paragraph and less in following paragraphs) – best to write for people NOT search engines!
- In the list of keywords for the page (keyword “meta tags”)
- In the page description (“meta description” – the summary displayed by the search engines)
It is important that every page or blog post on your website has ONLY ONE focus keyword – the main topic of the page. Any more is not only “overkill”, but will dilute any effects on your ranking in the search engines. They don’t like to be confused, just like your readers!
Remember – keywords can be short phrases and are not limited to one word. E.g. one of my main “keywords” is “innovative website marketing”. There would be less people searching for that than for “website marketing”, but it is much easier to rank more highly for and those wanting to be innovative in their websites are my target market.
Search Terms
What terms are your ideal client using when searching for your service?
They may not be the same terms that you use.
Make a list of the 5-10 phrases that you think your ideal client will be searching and then play around with creating synonyms, abbreviations, plurals, past tense, pre tense, verbs, nouns, etc. From one word Build we can get: buildings, builder, built, construction, construct, constructor, construction and probably many more.
You will not rank for builder, so it’s keyword “phrases” that we are looking for that will attract your ideal client. E.g. Seaside Builder Torquay. The words seaside and builder need to be compared to other variants like coastal construction.
For the moment we are just looking to brainstorm, down the track you can compare these terms and phrases in Google Trends and the Adwords keyword tool.
To go the extra mile you can do a short-term Adwords campaign for a few hundred dollars testing all these key phrases. The data you get from the Adwords campaign will tell you what are the most commonly searched terms and what terms generate the most engagement on your site. You can measure this by bounce rate, pages visited and time on site.
Help Google Find You
You can assist Google by basically labeling your content. Everything on your site can be labeled by what’s called meta data. Meta data is not visible to the user, but helps Google web crawlers identify what your site is about. All good website platforms like WordPress have this baked in to make it very easy to add “meta data” to any page, image or link on your site.
On its own, meta data won’t do much to get you in the rankings. It needs to be accompanied with relevant content that backs up what the meta data is saying your site is about. Your content needs to have your keywords in it, plus synonyms and related words. If you are genuinely writing about the topic you want to rank for then this should happen naturally.
Make a list of some of the key pages for your website and what term that visitors might be searching to find that kind of information. Then select a Focus keyword / phrase and suggest a URL, title and description for that page:
| Page | Key Search Term | Focus Keyword / Phrase | Page URL | Page Title | Page Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Social Media
Social Media is today one of the indispensible tools on the internet and can help your target audience find you, your website and your services. The most important social networks to consider are:
- Google+
If your business relies heavily on visual media, then the following might also be considered:
- Youtube
Using social media for your business could be an entire workshop on its own. It’s important to know that to get the most from social media, you will need to invest time and money and it will probably be much more than you think!
For now, the first thing we need to determine is, where our audience is and then what we are prepared to invest in getting business via social media.
- Which social media is most appropriate to your business? Where are your target audience likely to be?
- How much time can you invest per month in social media?
- How much money can you invest per month in social media?
Building Relationships
The main purpose of creating a social media presence is to build and nurture relationships with your existing and previous customer base, followers and have your content shared more widely. Your social media profiles and pages can serve as a means for people to contact you and you can and should promptly reply to these inquiries as well.
If you keep your business at the forefront of your customers’ attention in social media, you will be the one they contact when they need to acquire your products and/or services.
Best Practices
- Post content that is relevant to your industry like recent industry news.
- Post content that interesting or informative to your audience like tips and tricks.
- Follow similar social media pages in your industry.
- Be a part of the community. Interact, share others’ posts and respond to others’ interactions.
- Make use of a human voice. Avoid sounding too corporate or salesy.
- Observe social media etiquette. Your social media identity defines your brand identity.
- Depending on your audience, post 1-4 short updates daily or 1-2 important announcements every week. Social Media Tools
- Don’t do sales!
To save your time, there are multiple tools, free and paid, that can help automate your social media campaigns.
- Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/)
- Buffer (https://buffer.com/)
In summary then, the second of our Seven Website Design Secrets, is to Get Found. Give people things to find, use the right keywords and DON’T try to “scheme” Google! And remember who your audience is.
In the next post of the Seven Website Design Secrets to Get You More Sales series, we’ll cover the topic of Getting Attention. In the meantime, please take a look at the workbook and find opportunities to improve your website – then take action.
Please leave your questions or feedback in the comments below.