Developing a beautiful website just isn’t enough anymore. You can spend hours and hours on the appearance, tweaking fonts and layouts to achieve exactly the look your client wants. But ultimately, the goal is to get your client’s brand found. And it’s not always easy to break through the clutter.
Getting caught up in design aspects just for the sake of appearance can lead to a bad user experience and ultimately very little traffic to the site. Fortunately, designers and developers can take certain steps as they are building the site to ensure it’s optimized for search engines. But none of this really matters if you aren’t clear on your ‘Why?’.
It all starts with a clear vision and goal.
To create a great online presence, we need to get really clear on what the business objectives are. Is the target market global or regional? And what is the best-case scenario when someone visits the site? Do you want to simply build a following and brand awareness? Or is your goal for them to call your business and request more information? If it’s an e-commerce site, then the goal should be for visitors to eventually purchase something. All of these factors are taken into account when the site is designed, developed and optimized for search engines.
A defined target market drives keyword research and implementation.
Once we are clear on the target market, web developers can research the keywords that will drive the best organic search ranking for the market and region. It’s important to use these relevant keywords throughout the content in your site. Ensuring you reach the right customers for your brand is more important than simply driving traffic to your website. Ultimately, you want visitors who are genuinely interested in what you are doing so they will spend time on your site and get to know who you are.
How can you build an engaged audience through blogging?
It’s all about content marketing. You may be familiar with the latest buzzword surrounding organic SEO and online marketing strategy. Content marketing is focused on creating quality content that gets shared, aligns with your brand and ranks in the Google search algorithm. So focus on your brand’s authentic voice and create a message that people will want to pass along through social media. It all comes back to your ‘Why?’, so generate content that shows why you do what you do. People tend to be far more interested understanding your passions. It makes them feel more connected and you will gain a following.
Websites We Like
We wanted to highlight a few sites that are doing a superb job with portraying a clear ‘Why’ paired with relevant and engaging content.
www.entrepreneur.com, www.brightstarr.com, www.helpink.com, www.heartfishpress.com
Building a strong presence online can seem a bit overwhelming but there are so many great resources to guide you along the way. www.mashable.com offers timely articles that help to show the latest trends in design and SEO. And a great tool for gauging your site’s relevance to search engines is www.seomoz.com. For a low monthly fee, this program will crawl your website to address issues that may be hurting your performance and will assess your current ranking among top search engines. And there are countless other sites like www.searchenginewatch.com and www.hubspot.com that publish guides and tips to help you stay ahead of the curve.
But remember you must have a strong foundation. Determine the key messages you want to convey, research how your market communicates and create an authentic voice that resonates with that audience.