What does your website REALLY need?
My business doesn’t have amazing photos or loads of text, what can I do.
When people talk about the amazing things they want their new companies website to be about, I try and nod my head and agree the best I can. In my head, though, I’m just thinking of all these great features they want, but they aren’t focusing on the company or what they are selling. There are many things a website needs before you can go crazy with features, in our opinion. And then the other consideration is great features are useless if no one can find them!
My website will have thousands of visitors when it goes live.
Creating a brand new website is like building a brand new shop slap bang in the middle of the Sahara desert. The website exists but only a few people know about it, and generally, if it’s a small local business then it’ll probably be family and a few friends. Of course, a simple share on Facebook will help get your wider online group friends to know about your site, but Facebook also controls if this link will show on your Facebook friends wall. Doing this won’t move your shop from the Sahara desert to Oxford Street but it certainly helps take it in the right direction.
A few nice photos and a little bit of text, maybe a famous quote they like is the basis of most first websites for a small local business. From this generally, they want to be at the top of Google, now this is a very general term and needs me to come back to this in a future post. But to get the site started the text content is the most important item on the website for two reasons. Your website needs to clearly tell the user, what you do, what you sell, where you are in the world as soon as possible.
Secondly, Google needs to know this information as well, and Google needs descriptive and informative text. Having this information on your site lets Google crawl your site and learn about what you do and why it should direct users to your site over the competitions. And that’s the aim, isn’t it?
Jamming keywords and phrasing isn’t your website text content isn’t the solution anymore. Google algorithms have become too bright. You need to write your content in a human-friendly way for the best results. At the end of the day, when users get to your site, they’ll benefit from having great content to read.
Google can’t read photos but it can read your text.
It’s overlooked because it takes time to write quality content for a website, but if you can write quality content, it will help you get higher in Google than any lovely photograph will.
Starting a new website, or redesigning a current website, think about where you focus your time. It’ll pay off in the long run. The website needs to be correct, but getting people to your site doesn’t end with the website. Have a good base with great content, and it’ll help your marketing or social media strategy in the long run.
This is a topic I’d love to cover more, but I’ll have to leave it for another time. If you’d like a FREE review of your website from a local search engine optimisation point of view, click here.
