What Should A Good Business Website Have To Be Successful? 

What a good business website should have to successfully drive quality traffic, leads and customers consistently

Most entrepreneurs and business owners understand that having a website is important. But not everyone knows why a website is important for their business or how to use a website to drive new customers to their business on a consistent basis. So, what should a good business website have in order for it to successfully drive new leads and sales for your business on a consistent basis?

A good business website should have a niche focus

When starting your website, it is important that you firmly understand who your target audience is and what things they care about. The worst mistake that you can make when starting your website is trying to appeal to a broad audience. Appealing to a broad audience is extremely difficult. The biggest brands of our time who attempt to appeal to a wide audience do so because they have budgets usually that consist of millions of pounds to market and advertise their website which many start-up entrepreneurs simply do not have access to. The companies who do have access to these types of funds still focus heavily on creating personalised experiences for their customers. Amazon is a great example. Amazon did not start out selling products in every category under the sun. They simply started selling books and expanded their business gradually as time went on.

The way that Amazon appeal to such a broad audience is not just because they have literally millions of products. They are able to personalise the experience that each of their customers have on their website. If you log into your Amazon account, you are likely to be recommended products based on your past searches on Amazon, products that you have spent time looking at and products that you have purchased in the past. The recommendations that you see on Amazon when you log in are specifically tailored to you in a way that smaller business websites are likely only able to achieve when they focus on niche marketing. 

Your niche will help you to determine what colours you use on your website, what language you use on your website as well as how you intend to go about marketing your website. Simply put, the better you know your target audience, the easier it is to reach them, and you can create a tailor made website that appeals to your target audience and attracts them to your website. 

A good business website should have a sales funnel process

A lot of business owners create a website and list their products and services on their website and just expect people to buy. I am never surprised when a business owner has this approach and sees little to no sales even if they spend money doing online marketing or hiring an SEO firm. This is because they do not have a well thought-out sales process that will aid people through a seamless buyer journey. This sales process in marketing is known as a funnel and these funnels help to transform your website into an actual online business that generates revenue consistently.

A sales funnel is usually illustrated as seen above with different layers. The top layer is the awareness phase and this is how you make people aware that your business exists. This happens away from your website and includes marketing methods such as SEO, PR, Social media marketing, YouTube marketing and any other method you might choose to promote your business either offline or online. If people have no way of discovering your website, there is no chance of them magically arriving at your website and this is the part that most website owners and business people understand. They know that they need to drive traffic to their website and this is a great start.

Driving traffic however, is only one component. Statistically, the vast majority of people who visit your website will never return again. This means you can spend a great deal of money, time and effort driving traffic to your website for people to visit you one time and never come back. Businesses who only focus on the traffic aspect of their website usually go out of business extremely quickly.

Let’s look at Amazon as an example again. Amazon rely heavily on repeat business. If a new law was passed and it prevented people from buying from Amazon more than 1 time. How long would it be before Amazon went out of business? The answer is likely, not very long. Amazon would not survive if they only focused on new customers and did not try to get people back to their website to make additional purchases or at the very least to recommend Amazon to new people. 

Your past website visitors and customers are likely going to be your best and most loyal customers if you learn how to nurture them in the right way. A great way to train your website visitors to visit your website again is to have Google analytics installed on your website. This is a free code that you can get when you create a Google analytics account for your website.

This code allows you to track the activity that happens on your website so that you can moderate things such as your most popular website pages as well as the average time someone spends on your website.

With Google analytics you can also do what is known as pixel retargeting. You may have seen this where you visit a website and then you go somewhere else on the internet and notice an advert for the same product you were just looking at. This is because you have been pixel retargeted and this can be an effective way to ensure your past website visitors see your offer again and visit your website in the future. With privacy laws changing, it is important that you make people aware that they are being pixel retargeted. You can do this by having a privacy notification on your website that let’s people know you have pixel tracking code on your website.

This is also now a requirement if you plan on using Google analytics so do not skip this step. It is also best practice to have a privacy policy on your website. This can literally be a page on your website that outlines how you intend on using your website visitor’s data. Your privacy page usually goes in the footer section of your website navigation.

Pixel retargeting is just one way of getting people back to your website and although it can be effective, it can be expensive because in order to pixel retarget your website visitors, you often need to pay. For example, if you know that your target audience spend a lot of their time on Instagram, you may want to retarget people who visit your website using Instagram ads. This will obviously cost you money to get back in front of these people.

A cheap and more effective way to get people back to your website is by using email marketing. This is where you entice your website visitors to leave their name and email address when they visit your website so that you can keep in touch with them and send them emails that bring them back to your website at a later date. You can use email marketing software such as Aweber to manage your email marketing and they have a free starter plan for new businesses.

You can also connect your email marketing software to your payment gateway. Let’s say for example your chosen payment method for your website is stripe. You can connect stripe to Aweber or whatever email marketing software you decide to use. This ensures that every one of your customers gets put onto your mailing list. This is important because your past customers are usually your best and most loyal customers.

You may notice that whenever you make a purchase from Amazon that you get a follow-up email that promotes other products related to the product you have just purchased. This is Amazon’s way of getting you back to their website to make additional purchases which is one of the many ways Amazon gets you to buy more.

Your website should have an SEO strategy

SEO is the art of getting your website found in Google and having a good SEO strategy can mean that your website is a lot more likely to show up in Google when your ideal customers type in queries that are relevant to the products, services or information that you have on your website. Google is still the number one website in the world and there are a few simple things that you can do to ensure that the important pages on your website show up in Google.

1)  Having a focus keyword

Google does not rank entire websites all at once. What they do instead is they rank individual web pages one by one. What this means is that every time you publish a new page on your website, it is a new opportunity for you to be found in Google for a new keyword. A keyword is simply the word or phrase that your potential customer will use to search Google to hopefully find your website. It is important however for you to know what keywords your ideal customer is using in Google so that you can optimise your web pages for those keywords. Platforms such as Answerthepublic.com and The Google Keyword Planner Tool allow you to see what popular search terms your potential customers are using.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to make one webpage that ranks in Google for multiple keywords. It is a lot more effective to create dedicated pages on your website for each keyword you would like your website to rank for.

2) Starting a blog

When you do your keyword research, you may notice that some keywords are questions that your target audience frequently ask Google. For example, you might sell a product on your website that helps to prevent hair loss. You might use Answerthepublic.com and realise that your ideal customer is searching for terms such as ‘are hair loss tablets safe’ and ‘can hair loss be a sign of something serious’.

 These are keywords that require blog articles, and you can use the blog section of your website to target these keywords so that when your target audience is searching for them, your website is likely to show up highly as it provides clear answers to these questions. You obviously want to ensure that you are providing high quality answers to these questions and not creating content that is not valuable. Google can see right through content that is inaccurate or not useful and creating bad content just for the purposes of ranking in Google can actually negatively impact the chances of your website showing up in Google.

3) Keyword placement

When you are creating a page on your website, you want to ensure that you have your main keyword in mind. Whether it is a product or service page that you want people to find in Google when they are directly looking to buy, or whether it is a keyword that is more content focused it is important to have the keyword for your pages in the URL of your website, The meta title and meta description, in your H1 tag and throughout the body of your content.

4) The URL

Each page on your website will have a slightly different URL and this is something that you can change. Google will read your URL to get a better understanding of what your page is about and as such, your URL is a great place to put your keyword. Let’s say you create a page on your website and your target keyword for that page is ‘are hair loss tablets safe’. Your URL should be yourwebsite.com/are-hair-loss-tablets-safe

Notice the use of a hyphen after each word, this is important as it let’s Google know that this is a sentence.

5) Meta title and description

Your meta title and description is what Google will show to potential website visitors when your webpage appears in Google.

It gives them a preview of what to expect if they click through to your website. In whatever website platform you are using to create your website, you should see an ‘SEO settings’ option. This option allows you to change your meta title and description so that you can ensure they both contain your target keywords.

6) HI Tag 

When you are creating your content for your website, you should see a stylistic option in your website builder that either says Heading 1 or H1.

This is not just a font feature; this is designed to tell Google what keyword that page is focused on. You want to ensure that you use that option as a heading feature for your website and that your heading contains the keyword that you would like Google to rank that page for. 

7) Content

Lastly, it is good practise to use your keyword or at least a slight variation of it throughout the page that you create. If the page is a product page, then try to use it as organically as possible in the product description, if it is a blog article then use it where you can when writing your article. For example, the main keyword for this blog article I am writing now is,

‘what should a good business website have’

I am actually using this as an example because it is another way of me using my keyword organically in this post!

The reason why I say you should use your keyword organically is because Google can see if you are trying to ‘game the system’ and using your keyword 100 times on a page where it does not feel natural will make Google mark your website as spam and you will struggle to rank your website in Google with this approach.

A good business website should have a traffic generation strategy

SEO is a great way to drive passive traffic to your website from Google and the other major search engines such as Yahoo and Bing for free. Although SEO is a great source of traffic to your website, it can take a while for your website to start ranking in Google. Even if you optimise your pages for SEO, it can sometimes take many months before Google index your website. Although there are ways that you can speed this process up. You may want to consider other options to drive new visitors to your website including things such as:

–           Social media marketing

–           YouTube video marketing

–           Paid Ads

–           Influencer marketing

 Regardless of what method you use to promote your website, it is important to remember to have a retargeting strategy. Have an option on your website that allows people to sign up to your newsletter. Retarget your visitors where you can and create retargeting ads online and focus on retaining your past website visitors and watch your business website flourish.

For more marketing tips, make sure you download ‘The Formula’ which is a free eBook that outlines some of the essentials to marketing your businesses website online to consistently attract new leads and customers.