Building a website for your business can often seem complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. If you know how to use the right tools and processes, it will become much easier.
To help you get the best results and ensure people visit your new website, we’re going to outline 7 steps you should follow in the process of building it. Read on to find out more!
When starting your website, one of the first and most important things you need to do is claim a strong domain name. To choose the best domain name, you’ll want to go for something short and sweet while avoiding hyphens or numbers if you can.
Most people will opt for their name or the name of their business, and you can do the same. But, if you’d like to take a different approach, you should make sure the domain name contains keywords related to your niche.
If you’re still in the early stages of starting your business and haven’t even fully settled on a name yet, you’ll have a lot more freedom when it comes to choosing a domain. If you require some inspiration, you can also use the business name generator from Looka, which will help you brainstorm and find the perfect name for your brand.
When you’ve seen the perfect name, make sure you take action and buy it immediately, as it might not be available the next time you check. You also want to buy your domain name from a secure site that offers great value. NameSilo is perfect for this.
A website hosting provider is a business that will provide the online space to run your website. It allows you to keep your website online so that people can access and interact with it via the internet. When choosing a website hosting provider, you’ll find that some will be more suitable for your business than others.
A good web host should offer fast load speeds because people will most likely leave your site if it takes too long to load. Also, you should opt for web hosts that can support Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates. These act as an extra layer of security that helps encrypt the information shared between your server and your website users. This is especially important if customers are going to be purchasing products or services on your site, as it will help keep their payment details safe.
You might be concerned that you need to shell out a lot of money to get a good web hosting provider, but you don’t need to. There are good web hosts, like NameSilo that provide cheap hosting services with all the features I’ve just mentioned and also deliver world-class support.
Website builders are definitely one of the important branding tools you need to get your business noticed. A website builder is a tool that helps you to construct and design your website without the need to have any coding or technical skills. You’ll need to use one if you want to personalize your site and display all your offerings. Examples of some popular website builders include WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace.
To choose a good website builder, you need to watch out for ease of use, especially if you do not have any coding or design knowledge. You’ll ideally want to go for a builder that makes it very easy to build your website and one that offers multiple design templates and extras for you to choose from.
Another thing to consider is whether the builder offers responsive options. People nowadays are browsing on various devices — phones, laptops, desktops, or tablets — so you need to make sure you use a builder that will allow your site to display correctly on any device.
While your website will grow over time, you’ll want to make sure your core pages are designed straight away. These will include your homepage, eCommerce category pages (if relevant), and your product or service pages.
It’s important to ensure these pages are all easy to reach through your navigation and that they’re all optimized with copy and quality images. Your core web pages should also include a header and footer with internal links that make it easy for people to move from one page to another.
To get the most out of these pages, you have to include optimized keywords relevant to your niche. These will help your pages become more visible on search engines and drive more traffic to your website. Also, ensure that you include catchy calls-to-action that tell website visitors what you would like them to do when they reach your site.
Finally, you’ll want to ensure that your page load speed is as fast as possible, so avoid overloading your site with large image files and unnecessary elements. If people land on a core page like your homepage, and it’s taking too long to load, they’ll most likely lose interest and leave the website altogether.
Regardless of the kind of business you operate, you should consider adding a blog to your site. This is one of the best marketing strategies for small businesses because company blogs are very good for SEO. This is primarily because they give you the chance to target even more relevant keywords to what you do or sell.
You can also use your blog as an opportunity to provide free value for customers and earn your audience’s trust. Additionally, owning a blog gives you an extra place to promote your latest products and will allow you to create content that helps your customers make informed purchases.
When adding a blog to your website, you’ll want to ensure you’re doing all you can to help it flourish. You should make sure it’s updated regularly, easy to navigate, and all the content should be very relevant to what you do as a business.
Some examples of the kinds of content you could publish on your business blog include ultimate guides, buying guides, how-to guides, articles on industry news, and trend pieces.
Ultimate guides are comprehensive pieces of content that allow you to explain a topic to your audience in full detail. You can even create separate blog posts if the topic is quite broad and needs to be broken down into smaller sections.
Buying guides can be blog posts or comparison pieces that you can use to provide all the information someone will need to consider when preparing to invest in a new product or service. Take a look at the example below to see how Best Value Schools created a guide like this to help their readers.
Best Value Schools is an online resource for people who want to pursue higher education. They offer value to their audience by providing information about the best schools according to various ranking factors. Most of their blog posts are comparison pieces that rank different schools to guide their readers on the best one to go to.
In this example, we have their guide to the 29 best online universities in 2021. The piece lists out 29 of the top online universities in the United States and ranks them based on tuition fees, type of programs, and other factors. It’s a good example of how you can use your blog to offer valuable information to your audience and help them make very important decisions. The great thing about buying guides or comparison pieces is that they work for any industry, so regardless of the business you’re in, you can always create posts that compare other solutions or provide in-depth information that will help people decide what product or service is best for them.
As for how-to-guides, they can be used to show readers how to perform a specific task with step-by-step instructions. This will help earn their trust, show you’re an expert in your field, and lead to more sales. We also have trend pieces, which are articles you can write to enlighten your audience about current events or trends in your industry.
Lastly, when we talk about industry news articles, these are posts that contain information about happenings in the field or industry you work in. To give you some inspiration, here is a real-world example of a website that publishes industry news on its blog.
Reid Supply is a provider of industrial parts for the construction industry. They’ve published various posts that educate their readers about different concepts and topics in the construction field on their blog.
By regularly updating their blog with industry news, they’ve turned their site into a helpful resource that their target audience can keep coming back to for the latest updates. This will help more of their ideal audience to find them through search engines. This can then lead to more sales, as it gets the right people on their site.
One thing to take note of when creating a blog is your posting consistency. Your audience will be counting on you to provide valuable pieces of information, so make sure you follow a consistent posting schedule. Marketing Insider Group recommends publishing a blog post 2-4 times a week, and you can start with this in the beginning as you figure out what works for you.
When building your website, you need to ensure that you always create a space for proof that shows you’re great at what you do. To do this effectively, you should include customer reviews, testimonials, and media mentions that show which websites your company has been featured on.
You could also add awards and accolades that have been presented to your brand or industry, qualifications that you’ve acquired to show that you’re certified and fully capable of providing the services you offer.
Now, let’s look at some companies that have done a great job of including social proof on their websites to provide evidence that they’re great at what they do.
Florin Roebig is a law firm that specializes in areas like personal injury and accidents. Their website has a page that provides information about how their car accident lawyers can help get people compensation if they’ve been involved in or sustained injuries from auto accidents.
They give details about common types of car accident injuries, factors that affect car accident claims and also include a testimonial from one of their clients. In the testimonial, the client explains how instrumental the company has been in helping her get coverage from her car insurance provider after being a victim of a hit-and-run incident. Adding this to their page is a great way to convince potential clients, and it can be instrumental in getting them more customers.
Our next example is from Excel Builders, a company that offers custom home-building services and renovations and remodellings. They’ve done a fantastic job of displaying some of the logos of media sites that have mentioned their company on their homepage.
They also include a quote from Forbes magazine that refers to their projects as “next-generation custom homes.” By including these media mentions on their website, they’ve found a way to display social proof that proves they’re great at what they do.
This kind of evidence is very important for any type of business, be it product-based or service-based. To do the same for your website, create a section on your homepage (possibly in the middle of the page) where you can display customer reviews or accolades. You could also position them on banners at the left or right side of your site so visitors can see them as they scroll by. Another thing you could do is create a separate webpage, so you’ll be able to show all the reviews and testimonials you want without worrying about space.
As you create your website, you want to ensure you incorporate plenty of content that helps people understand your products or services, as this will help you make plenty of sales. Now, let’s look at the different types of content that you can use to help people understand your offerings.
These are videos, photos, or diagrams that you can create to show people exactly what your product does to help them solve their pain points and problems. When creating product demonstrations, you want to make sure you’re highlighting the features and benefits of what you sell.
You also need to be using high-quality video tools to make your product demonstrations. To do that, you can use a tool like InVideo, an online video editor that helps you to create professional videos in 5 minutes or less. The tool has plenty of templates, stock photos, and they are fully customizable.
A case study is essentially a piece of content that you can use to show how your company has helped a client to achieve certain goals. It would include your clients’ objectives, the problems or challenges they had, the solutions you proffered, and the results that were achieved from working with your company.
Case studies offer a way for you to show future prospects how you can help them. Let’s take a look at an example of a typical case study, so you can get a better idea.
Drift is a company that provides conversational AI tools that help their customers to grow revenue and improve their businesses. They have lots of case studies on their website, and one of them shows how they were able to help a client, Skillsoft. They outline the company’s challenges, solutions implemented, and the results they got, which included 200+ meetings booked and 2900 emails captured.
Case studies are really important for your company’s website because they actually show potential customers what you can do for them and, if used correctly, they can help you close even more deals. When creating them, you should make sure you pay close attention to details and are able to structure the content in such a way that there’s a clear path from your objectives to the results.
One thing you want to ensure you’re doing on your website is making sure you use your content to show who your target audience are. You can’t sell to everyone and, quite frankly, you shouldn’t want to. Instead, you should try to ensure your content is targeted at the people who actually want or need your products and services. This way, you can be sure that the leads you’re pulling in will be qualified.
Here’s an example from FreshBooks, where they’ve created a piece of content that sheds more light on who their services are actually for.
As a company that provides an online accounting solution for small and medium-sized businesses, FreshBooks understands that there are people in their audience who might not be entirely sure whether or not they need to be using the company’s services.
So, they’ve created a post that explains what cloud accounting software is and the reasons why any business would want to consider using it. The great thing about this post is that it gives people in their audience a better understanding of cloud accounting while indirectly highlighting the kinds of businesses that should ideally be using their software.
User guides User guides are manuals that include information about a product or service. They are mostly provided by owners of software that want to make things easier for their customers by providing a manual with step-by-step instructions.
Most user guides nowadays don’t come in a single-page pamphlet or PDF, but rather can be found on companies’ websites, on their blogs, or in their knowledge hubs. If you want to learn more about user guides, Cloud Tutorial has a great post that you can read on how you can build the best user guides for your customers.
Creating a website is not the easiest of tasks but, if you’re able to use these useful tips we’ve covered, you’ll find that it’s not as scary as it seems.
You can start by claiming a strong domain name, choosing a suitable website host, and picking an easy-to-use website builder. Once you’ve made progress with these steps, you can continue with the rest.
And, if you want to stay updated about online marketing, website security, or domains, make sure to follow the NameSilo blog for regularly published posts on these topics.
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