Marketing

This is the single most important question business owners should be asking when they're getting a website built for their business. Unfortunately, it's a very difficult question to answer.

A good way to think about your website is like a physical shop or showroom, on a quiet street with very few passers-by. If you had a shop or showroom like that, how would you get people to visit it? Would you put up signs, handout fliers, or perhaps pay for advertising on a billboard? For each of these, we can ask almost the same question about your website.

Then once you get people to your store (your website), how to you turn them into paying customers? How do you inform them, impress them, and get the to make a purchase, or to take some other kind of action that will lead to a future purchase? Once again, the answers are the same, whether we're talking about a physical store, or your website.

In summary, a website will bring you sales if you get people to visit it, and if you can get them to buy when they do. How the site is built can make a big impact on the second one, but your marketing activities will determine the first one.

If you'd like your website to bring you more sales, give us a call to discuss it.

When someone is searching for your products or services online, they're going to type something in to Google, and you want your website to show up in the results when they do.

The two factors that Google will consider when someone searches:

The first is "How relevant is your website to what the person is searching for". For example, if you sell chairs and you're based in Cape Town, and someone searches "chairs in Cape Town", then your site will be highly relevant to them. But if they search for "couches in Johannesburg", your products might not be relevant to them, and your city definitely isn't where they're looking, so your relevance is really low.

There isn't really a way to make your website more "relevant" generally, because everyone's searching for something different, but it's important to make sure your website is using the words your customers will use when they're searching.

The second factor is "authority", which is basically Google calculation of how important and valuable your website is. It calculates this based on how many other sites are linking to your site (using links in their text), and how important each one is. So it's like a giant web, and the more your website is in the middle of it, the more important Google will think it is.

The want to improve "authority" is doing something called search engine optimisation (SEO), which we'll cover in much more detail in an entire article.

If you'd like to ask us more about making sure your customers find your website, let's arrange a meeting to discuss it. Go ahead and contact us.