Your website is one of the most effective marketing tools you have at your disposal. An effective website will ultimately drive sales for you business.
As part of the brand audit within the BrandQuest Marketing Strategy Program, we view and review our client’s websites to see if they are contributing to their brand growth. Unfortunately, many are not being utilised efficiently and are lacking at least one or more of following four critical aspects required to help grow their business:
- Design
- Optimisation
- Usability
- Measurement
In the first part of this article we will focus on the first two aspects and how you can use them to improve your website’s performance. In our next newsletter, we will cover the remaining two aspect – usability and measurement.
DESIGN
Web design is obviously a very important aspect of your website. Your site has about 2 seconds to grab the customer’s attention, and therefore needs not only to look attractive, but must also reflect your marketing strategy and be consistent with all other aspect of your marketing.
In previous articles we have talked about the six fundamental elements within your marketing strategy. The two elements that must be carefully considered when designing your website are:
– Who you need to say it to >>> your target market
– How you should say it >>> your brand essence
Your target market helps focus your message (see How to Avoid Expensive Marketing Mistakes)
Once you have provided your web designer with a brief that is reflective of your marketing strategy, you need to also be aware of some design faux pas that designers like to incorporate.
| 1. | Don’t burden your pages with high-resolution images. This will increase the loading time of your web site and if takes too long to download the site visitor will likely move on. |
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| 2. | Hold back on the razzle and dazzle. Sites that twinkle and sparkle with too many animated buttons, flashy banners and useless pictures will distract your customers from what you really want them to see and read on your site and will probably make them dizzy and leave. |
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| 3. | Leave Flash for game and entertainment sites. Using a flash site instead of text will make it really hard for customers to find your site as search engines do not like flash. If you are really committed to a flash site, then make sure you also create a non-Flash version. |
OPTIMISATION
Optimisation (often referred to as SEO – search engine optimisation) is the process of increasing web traffic to your site by improving your natural rank in a search engine such as google. Unless a site is listed on the first search page, the likelihood is that it will not be found by your potential customers.
Search engines have specific criteria and algorithms to determine where a website ranks. Over 85% of people in Australia use Google, so while there are a few different criteria for each search engine, there is little point worrying about the others.
Keywords
The first step, once again, is understanding your target market and the likely words or phrases that they will use to search for what you are offering. Where it gets tricky, is working out which keywords are realistic to optimise for. It is not about ranking for the most popular keyword, but rather the most relevant keywords.
If you sell female clothing, trying to rank with the keyword phrase “female apparel” will pit you against 16,000,000 other listings. If you narrow this down to “female business apparel sydney” it will reduce competition to 94,600 other pages (this may still seem like a lot, but this means that there are only 94,000 sites in the entire globe that contain those key words and most would not be optimised to rank on the first page for that keyword phrase).
How do I “own” my keywords?
Content is King!!! Each page on your website can target up to 2 – 4 keywords. Original and relevant content that has an appropriate level of keyword density is best (the number of times your keywords are used as a percentage of total text on the page). A benchmark that is often used is 6 – 8% density, however the key is to make sure the page reads well and makes sense.
So now that you have determined your keywords and have the right content, you need to optimise your search results. While there is a lot of conjecture regarding the factors affecting your search engine ranking, here are 5 that will have a great impact.
| 1. | Keyword use in your title tag Your title tag is written in your HTML code (the language that your website is written in) and generally appears at the top of the browser window. Going back to our example – if we now search for “women’s dresses sydney” in google, the first listing is for the site StyleFeeder.com and its title tag is “Abercrombie & Fitch > Women > Dresses > Sydney – StyleFeeder.com”. The title tag should be 65 characters and be unique to each page of your site. |
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| 2. | Popularity contest – inbound links This is based on how many websites know of you (link to your site) and how popular they are. Google uses “page rank” as their measure of your popularity with a score of 1 – 10. The more popular the site linking to yours, the more popular you will become. These links should come to all pages in your website, not only your homepage, and should have relevant descriptive link text/phrases. |
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| 3. | Internal links Linking from one page in your site to other internal pages is another good SEO tactic. These links should utilise good and relevant phrases rather than the generic “click here”. This will help your keyword ranking and therefore increase the user experience as they will be able to find other relevant content on your site. |
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| 4. | META Description Tag This is another tag that is written “under the bonnet” in the HTML of the site. It is a brief description of the page and should not exceed 200 – 250 characters. All search engines read the description tag, and utilise the content found within in the ranking process. |
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| 5. | Tag Your Images Search engines can’t see images, but adding ALT image tags (HTML tags describing an image, and appears when the mouse is rolled over the image) will be used by google to improve your ranking. |
Now that you have increased the traffic to your site, you need to focus on converting more users into customers. This is achieved by increasing your sites Usability and Measuring the success of all your efforts.
TO BE CONTINUED …
Stay tuned for the next installment where we will go into more depth regarding these final two aspects.
