Web Designers Ireland
If you're about to hire a web designer to develop a new website for your business the following information is relevant.
The web is the perfect way to get qualified sales leads for your business. It's the most important marketing tool available because it can reach into customer niches that would be impossible with any other medium.
However you won't get results just by building a website and then forgetting about it. In this article you'll learn why you probably haven't been getting the results you expected from your site - and what you can do about it.
Has Your Old Website Generated Revenue?
Has your website failed to generate revenue while so many others are making money? Maybe you’ve had unrealistic expectation of what it could achieve? While that’s possible it’s more likely that your website hasn’t been set up and promoted properly and that’s the reason it hasn’t been able to achieve its full potential.
Putting it in Perspective
Imagine that the entire continent of Africa is completely covered in dense jungle and your website is a billboard right in the middle. You’d have a better chance of jumping out of a plane and landing directly on the billboard than you have of being found on the Internet by accident. Your website is one of billions. The chances of a potential customer coming across your site are zero – that is unless you take some positive steps to make sure they find it.
The Search Engines
The first thing, of course, is to get your site listed in all the search engines. Everyone uses Google to find what they’re looking for so you need to be listed on that. However it’s not as easy as it appears. Let’s say that you're one of the many web designers in Ireland. You’d like your site to be listed when a potential customer types in the words “web designer”, won’t you?
The Competition
If you do a quick search you’ll find that Google already has over forty-four-million pages with that keyword phrase listed. The possibility that your site will show up on the first page for that phrase is zero.
How Google Works
There’s another problem - you have no control over how Google lists your pages. It may ignore your product or service and decide that the pages should be listed under a completely different search term. If that happens you may get traffic to your site but it’s highly unlikely to turn into business. Unless you can take some active steps to tackle these issues your website is simply not going to generate any revenue for your business.
Using the Right Search Phrases
So what can you do to improve the number of potential customers landing on your site? The first thing is to find out what are they actually searching for. What phrase do they type into the search engine when they're looking for your product or service? You’ll need a list of all the search terms they're likely to use.
Search Phrases
At one time this would have been a guessing game but now it’s possible to establish exactly what phrases are being used – so that’s the first step. Next you need to look at each of those phrases and find out what the level of competition is like. If there are several million pages on Google for a particular phrase then you should forget about it – no matter how tempting it looks. You’ll only be wasting time and money trying to get it into the search engines.
Working Out the Numbers
Next you should look at the number of searches for each phrase. If only a handful of people are using a phrase to search for your offering then it’s a waste of time trying to get it into the search engines. You need a good balance between the number of searches for a phrase and the level of competition.
Building a Landing Page
When you have identified at least five ideal phrases for your product or service you're ready to take the next step – building a landing page for each one. A landing page is optimized for a specific phrase. For example, if you found that there was a reasonable number of searches every month for “web designers Ireland” and the competition was reasonable then you would dedicate one of your landing pages to that key phrase.
Web Designers Ireland
It’s important to remember that you have to be as literal as you can. The phrase "web designers Ireland" is not the same as Irish web designer or even Ireland web designers. In other words you must try to use the exact phrase in the page – and it has to make sense.
Artificial Intelligent
Some people still believe that it’s enough to insert the search phrase in the page a few times but that’s missing the point - for two reasons. First Google and the other search engines are getting more intelligent all the time. They’re already able to tell if your text makes a reasonable level of sense – and they’re getting better at it.
Getting your Customers to Buy
The second reason is even more important. When your potential customers land on the page they must be captivated by your text. It must hold their interest so they don’t click away immediately. That isn’t going to happen unless you’ve spent some time (or money) getting it right.
The Contents of the Page
The content of the page has also got to match up to the searcher’s expectations. If they typed in web designers Ireland then they expect the page will relate to that term – if it doesn’t they’re gone.
The Next Step
Now let's see what you actually have to do to develop an effective website that will generate revenue for your company.
