The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here. Chapter 4 – Finding The Right Web Hosting Company can be found here
Now you should have your list of keywords to target, you have your domain name, and you have hosting for your website. Now you start building or designing your site right? Sorry. Not yet. You have to have a plan.
Know Your Target Audience
We covered this a little in the chapter about choosing your keywords and key phrases, but we need to mention it again here.
Let’s say you are a moving company. You provide truck rentals, self moving options, and full service moves. That means you have three different types of people coming to your website that each want something different.
You have to plan your website so that you can make it easy for each of these target groups get to where you want them to go in your website whether that be the contact form, an estimate form, signing up for a newsletter, calling you on the phone, or hitting an order or buy now button.
The Main Page
When most poeple think of and plan their website, they think of how they will get people from the front page into the rest of the website. They see the front page as their “doorway” into their website.
This kind of thinking will cost you sales. Every single page in your website can be a landing page. That means that people may enter your website by landing on any page, so not everyone will even see your front page. Not if you plan correctly that is.
Search engines crawl and index web “pages”, not web “sites”. Every page in your website can get a search engine listing for the keywords and phrases chosen for that page. So keep this in mind as we plan your website.
For now, we will talk about those that do land on your main or front page. Remember we had three types of people who might land on your front page after a search or by clicking a link. Now we need to help those people get to what they want.
You need to plan and build your main page to give easy choices to your visitors. Do not depend on your visitors using your navigation menu to get to where you want them to go. Don’t think that because you have all of this great navigation in a really cool menu that people will use it to find what they want.
Make it easy. With our moving company website example, we would build the navigation menu, then more importantly, in the top center, the most obvious place for people to look, you will give them three simple choices.
1. Do you want to rent a truck for your move? or just Moving Truck Rental.
2. Are you ready to save money with self-moving where you pack the boxes and load the truck?
3. Do you want us to handle everything for you so you don’t have to worry?
You can word those any way you want as long as it clearly explains to each type of visitor where to go to get what they are looking for. Your main or front page should be designed to divide and conquer. Split up the different types of users and send them to the section of your website they are interested in or send them right to the page where you can close the sale.
Understanding How Your Potential Customers Get To Your Website And Giving Them What They Want
This is the thing you need to understand. A user goes to a search engine. They type in moving truck rental let’s say. We do not want that user to get to your main page. It’s ok iof they do. We set up the main page to help them get to the page they really want, but that is still not the best thing that can happen.
The best thing that can happen is that your page that is all about moving truck rentals is the page that ranks well for that phrase and the page that user lands on. That means they type in moving truck rental and with one click go right to the page where they can rent a moving truck.
Imagine that. Giving them the exact thing they are searching for. The search engine’s job is to provide relevant results to it’s users. Your job is to make sure that your content is the relevant content the search engine provides. Work with the search engines not against them. Don’t try to trick the search engines. That will cost you in the long run.
Plan to build pages that are optimized for the keywords and phrases that are really relevant to each page. Make it very easy for the customer to make their purchase. Give the user exactly what they are looking for and you will convert sales.
In the next section of this chapter we will show you an example of how to build a proper navigation plan for your website.
