10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up A Website

1 Do you need a website?Short answer: yes. There was a time when many businesses could survive without a website, but these days it’s a requirement.

For many businesses like yours, the website is the main source of leads, sales and even provides customer service 24/7/365.

People don’t use the Yellow Pages. They fast forward through commer-cials. They don’t read the paper. If they need information they Google it or ask a friend on Facebook. All roads must lead to your website.

Your website is the hub of all your marketing and advertising, online and o�.

Even if you don’t envision your website as creating new business, it can be a source of credibility for your prospects. When they get your business card or hear about you from a friend, the �rst thing they’ll do is check out your website.

No website = no credibility = no business.

2

3

What are your business goals? Having clear, written goals will greatly improve the e�ectiveness of your website. If you don’t have a clear target you’ll never know if your website is working.

Take some time to write out your main business goals. Are you looking to grow your business by a certain percentage over the next year? Bring a new product to market? Target a new audience for an established service?

As you think about your business goals and priorities, it will make it easier to organize your website and decide what to promote, what to deempha-size, and what to remove entirely.

What is the biggest problem of your ideal customer?Your website is not about you, it’s about your customers.

That’s so important let me say it again: your website is not about you, it’s about your customers.

Too often businesses make the mistake of talking about themselves and ignoring their customers on their website. When people visit your site they’re not interested in how long you’ve been in business, what commu-nity awards you’ve won, or that you’re a people person…at least not at �rst.

They’re at your site because they have a problem.

Maybe they have crabgrass and don’t want to use chemicals on their lawn. Maybe they can’t �nd and retain the right employees. Maybe they have no idea what to buy their niece for her birthday.

You need to understand your ideal customer’s biggest problem(s) and address them right from the home page and on all the pages after that.

By arranging your website around the needs of your ideal customers you greatly increase your chances of getting the sale.

4 Who’s going to write the content and take the photos for your site?There are two critical areas of website design that businesses don’t give enough attention: the copy and the photography. Poor quality writing or images can tarnish an otherwise e�ective website, killing your conversion rates.

Writing for the web requires a good understanding of SEO—search engine optimization—as well as persuasive copywriting techniques. Your goal is to inform, educate and compel people to take a desired action, like clicking on a “buy now” button or �lling out a contact form.

If you’re going to write your own copy you should budget 2 – 3 hours for each page on your site. You should also consider learning a bit about SEO and picking up a book on copywriting.

If you’re going to hire a copywriter—always an excellent investment-you should ask for samples of their writing and ask them if they have experience writing content for the search engines.

For photography, consider hiring a professional photographer to take headshots of employees, o�ce space, and related photography.

If that’s outside of your budget, there are plenty of good stock photography resources on the web for any budget, with costs that range from just a few bucks to hundreds of dollars.

How will your site be kept up-to-date?Search engines and your customers will be looking for regular updates to your site in the form of articles, blog posts, new event listings and more.

Make sure your site is built on a CMS (content management system). There are plenty of platforms out there, like WordPress (our favorite), Drupal and Joomla that are open source and have no licensing fees.

If your site is built on one of these CMS platforms you’ll be able to add, edit or delete pages, upload photographs, or embed video on your website without any programming knowledge.

How do you drive traffic to your website?Once your website is up you’ll need to attract visitors to your site.

One critical source will be the search engines. Hopefully while you were developing your website you did a keyword analysis so you know what type of searches your prospects are doing on Google, and you worked those keywords into the content on your web pages.

5

6

Search engines also look for inbound links—links from another website or blog to your site—to determine if your site is of high quality. Those quality inbound links work like votes of con�dence, so you’ll want to get other sites to link to yours.

Social media will also drive quali�ed leads. Our experience shows that you can attract visitors by blogging regularly, posting videos to YouTube, and being active on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn.

How do you keep in touch with visitors after they’ve left your site?As di�cult as it is to get people to visit your site, it’s even more di�cult to get them to return. Your goal is to get permission to stay in contact with them after they’ve left your site.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to have an email newsletter signup on your website. Visitors can then opt-in to receive regular emails from you.

To get people to subscribe to your email newsletter you should o�er some “bait.” Like discounts to the online store, a monthly ra�e to sub-scribers, or a white paper like 10 Questions to Ask Before Setting Up a Web-site.

Other techniques include getting people to like you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, subscribe to your YouTube channel, or otherwise engage with you through social media.

7

How do you get people to take action at your site?Since the purpose of your website is to turn visitors into leads and pros-pects into customers, this is a critical question.

If you’ve written copy to rank well in the search engines and address your customers’ needs once they get to your site, you’re most of the way there.

However, it’s critical to have a call to action at the bottom of every page, and sometimes worked into the content as well.

Don’t assume your visitors will know what the next step is. O�er them a free consultation, or tell them to call now, and link those phrases to your contact form so you can capture their contact information. In short, ask for the sale.

You should try and engage your audience. Get them to download a free article, or watch a video that demonstrates your product or service. Put up a calculator so people can see how much they’ll save with your solution.

8

What should you expect to spend?Prices on websites vary greatly. Some of this is due to the size of your website (the number of pages), the functionality that you add to your site such as custom programming, the experience of your web development team, and even where in the world you live.

There are also ongoing costs: hosting, updates, and your own time and resources towards keeping your site fresh, posting to your blog, creating new videos, and staying active in social media.

The good news is that there’s a solution for every budget. There are free or nearly free website builders that you can use, and if you’re willing to invest some time in learning you can build your own website.

The question is: are you in the business of building websites or is your time better spent running your business?

When I �rst started my company I did everything myself…these days I outsource everything I can. It’s the only way to grow your business.

9

How do you know if any of this is working?Go back to your business goals…is your website helping you achieve them?

You should have some sort of tra�c reporting software—we recommend Google Analytics—that will give you information on how much tra�c your site gets, where that tra�c is coming from, and if they’re taking desired actions on your website.

In Google Analytics you can set up “Goals”, which will let you know if people are signing up for your email newsletter, �lling out your contact form or buying from your online store. You can then use the goals to trackback and see where your most valuable tra�c is coming from, and where new opportunities lie.

10

WHAT’S NEXT?

If you believe a website is critical to your company’s growth and success, if you’re serious about putting the time and energy into developing an e�ective online presence, and if you’re looking for an experienced partner to help you get there…well, then we’d love to talk.

You can call us at 207.871.7921 or �ll out our contact form at http://www.�yte.biz/contact

At �yte, we don’t build websites, we build businesses.