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Plan Your Move Online, Structure Your Business Online
Whether you are building a 6-page website or a 100+ pages website, learn to plan first.
When you fail to plan, you can plan your website to failure and end up with a flawed design, weak content, or poor usability or accessbility which eventually translates into low sales or visitor conversion.
Or you have got a website with great design, content, usability and accessibility, but still your website is not performing. Have you find out more whether your industry is as competitive as you think? Do you actually employ a strategy to compete online? You can find out more about building a website with a competitive edge after finish planning and building a website.
The big question is ‘Do you want your website to work as hard as you do for your business?’
This is the step-by-step guide by The Web Xpert’s to make sure that you have a well-planned performing website:
1. Define Business Success
Every business has its own set of success criteria, including Google and Yahoo. For example, even Google and Yahoo is in the same industry, Google focus more on its search ad inventory revenue from Google Adwords and Google Adsense whereas Yahoo focus on a variety of revenue stream through paid search ads, partnership with SBC Communications, online personals, premium emails, fantasy sports and so forth.
What about yours? Have you ever asked yourself:
- How can I get my customers to learn about my brand?
- What can I do to attract new customers?
- How can I keep my existing customers?
2. Define Website Objectives
Every business website has to start somewhere. For example, your website objective is getting more sales from your traffic. For a new website in a competitive marketplace selling books online, you would not want to compete with Barnes and Nobles or Amazon for terms like ‘books’ for search engine ranking for the start. If you do that, your website would not outlast them without deep pocket. So, you would want to be self-sustaining first and let others find your South Australia website with phrases like ‘comparing business books’, ‘Adelaide book sales’, ‘South Australia online bookstore’ to let others know about your brand. As your market share grows, you can build a revenue stream from your online traffic to grow your business and compete head-on with bigger businesses with your point of difference.
So, have you ever ask yourself:
- How would I want my website to look like in 1 year or 3 years or even 5 years time?
- How can I add value to my website content to improve my market share?
- What can my website do to gain a competitive edge over others at the local, national or international level?
3. Define Customer’s Needs
A lot of times, marketing textbooks have been re-written again and again about the need for business to understand customer’s needs. Imagine you are selling books. Do you know whether your prospects find your website in search engines when they type ‘discounted books Adelaide’? Do you know whether your potential customers find your ‘business book’ web page when they type ‘under $30 business books Adelaide’ in Google, Yahoo or MSN search engines?
Do you:
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Get connected to one of your ideal customer and strike a conversation with him or her to know that person better?
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Segment your customer’s needs from most important to least important?
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Think of innovative ways to add value to your customer’s life?
4. Segment Customers Needs to Web Page Goals
Your business can only grow when your customers pay you NOT once but over time. Let’s say you know that James is a loyal customer of your online bookstore. You may want to make James life easier. Every time he buys something from you, you can get him to type in a ‘username and password’ that will automatically retrieve his own credit card details. Unlike new customers, he saves his time when he does not need to re-type his credit card details in the ‘checkout’ page whenever he orders from you.
Do you:
- Find ways to improve your existing visitor’s online shopping experience?
- Make sure your new visitors find it easy to shop in your website?
- Anticipate what your visitors would like to buy from your website?
5. Site Architecture, Content Writing and Development
Your business plan is reflected on your website plan. Take some time to make sure that your website content is organised well so that visitors would not get ‘lost’ while searching for something within your site. You also need to fit in the right tone and right message so that visitors find it a pleasure to know your business better.
Do you know:
- How are your pages related to each other?
- How your on page web links allows information to flow logically? Whether you have an easy site wide navigation and page specific navigation?
- What content to be reviewed or added over time?
6. Site Testing
You have a great website but is your website sales funnel leaky? For instance, your visitor comes to your website looking to buy a book with your 20% book voucher. Let’s say the visitor’s name is Adam. Adam enters the ‘business books’ web page to look for his favourite title: ‘How to Sell to Your Perfect Customer by The Web Xpert’. He found it and decided to click ‘add to cart’. He enters ‘check out’ and decided to enter his credit card details and he noticed that there is no box for them to fill in their ‘voucher code’. He did not want to pay the full price but the discounted price. He is a bargain hunter. He was afraid that he will be charged the full price so he left your store to visit other website for his discount. In fact, the actual problem was that he did not get to visit the next page which has the box to fill in the ‘voucher code’. But sadly, you missed a sale by not adding just one line: ‘Redeem your voucher when you click here’ in the ‘checkout’ page.
Do you know:
- What your customers are thinking when they visit from one page to the other?
- How your customers feel when they look at your website?
- Why your customers decide to buy from others, BUT not you?
7. Site Implementation
You have a great product or service. You want to showcase it on your website. You translate your website to different languages so it can be accessed all over the world. You are waiting for the phone to ring for enquiries because you know that the product is so great that it will sell itself. Then you decided to do some advertising a few months later in your targeted export country. When the ad space seller wanted to audit your website for a quality check, he told you that he cannot access your website.
So, have you ever:
- Make sure that your website is accessible by your customers with different browsers in different country?
- Make sure that your website is loaded at a proper speed?
- Make sure that your website is hosted with a reliable hosting provider?
8. Ongoing Management
It is the people that manage your website that determines whether your website is good or great. Do you have the resource to grow your website? Do you have the right team to work on your business as hard as you do? Not having a big budget to sustain your business growth? For the start, you may want to partner with us to promote your business with our online marketing service.
Next: how to build a website with The Web Xpert’s help.
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