Congratulations, you have a website! Whether you built it yourself or paid to have it built that alone puts you ahead of many. So what happens next?
It’s time to improve that website and make it a place people want to visit on a regular basis. So what do you do? Here are some suggestions.
Improved Blog
A blog is your way to communicate with your readers and keep them coming back for more. The blog makes your website real. People like to know there are real people behind the site and a blog makes that possible.
Your blog should keep your visitors up to date with what is going on. It should educate and inform. Always think how the posts in your blog can help your visitors. This is of course a subject for a full post and I’ll address that in the near future.
Email Signup
Building your email list may be the most important goal of your website. Your visitor’s email allows you to stay in touch with your visitor. It allows you to market to your visitor who now becomes a lead rather than just a statistic.
Google Map Link
Does your business have a physical location? If so you should make it easy for visitors to find and visit that location. You should provide basic directions, and ideally you should make it easy for visitors to use Google Maps to find you. This is not too difficult as there are plugins that make it easy. These usually provide a little map where visitors can get a general idea where you are. Clicking on the little map brings up the full Google Maps site where visitors can get an even better idea and print directions directly to your location.
The Google Maps link is so common that visitors just expect it to be there. Don’t disappoint them!
More Detailed Products Page
If you sell products or services it is time to provide more detailed information to your visitors. If you only have a few products or services this can be a simple list of them, except with more detail.
If you have many products this is where eCommerce comes in. Things get a little more complicated. Luckily there are good tools that greatly simplify the process and do some of the hard work behind the scenes.
Optional – A Way To Order Products
Here you are actually selling directly from your site. There are tools like Shopify, WooCommerce, and others that can help. There is still work with tasks like writing your descriptions, but once you get a little practice the tools do a lot of the work that once took lots of programming.
A Little SEO
Now might be time to add a little SEO to your site. Start with my post “A Little SEO” to get started.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of improving your website and content so it gets better visibility in search engines. SEO relies on keywords which are simply terms that people search for.
Here are a few SEO basics:
Keywords in Page Title – Try to include keywords in your page title.
Keywords in H1 text – H1 Text is the larger text usually at the top of your website. Try to include keywords in this area.
Keywords in URL – Ideally you can include keywords in a page’s URL.
See the post “A Little SEO” for other ideas.
There are of course many more things that you can add to your basic website, but hopefully these ideas will get you started.
Good Luck!
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