A Web Site That
Works Day and Night
I’m not sure how it happened, but somewhere early on in the formation of the Internet somebody decided that Web sites weren’t marketing tools, so the content and design didn’t have to relate in any way to the rest of the marketing activity. Millions of small business owners rushed out and hired “Web designers” to work on “that part” of their business. I can’t tell you how many small business Web sites I have visited that just don’t make sense. I’ve seen Web sites that:
• Don’t feature the company logo
• Have spinning doodads that do little but distract
• Are impossible to navigate
• Don’t have an address or phone number—anywhere
• Have entirely different core messages than the rest of the marketing
• Don’t adhere in any way, shape, or form to other marketing collateral material
In this chapter we are going to cover the basics of using a Web site to promote your business. Notice that I didn’t say we are going to discuss whether or not a Web site is right for your business or not. If you don’t already have a Web site, heed this warning: harness the Internet or prepare to become obsolete.
This text is not meant to be a complete discussion of everything to do with the Web; there are some great books on the subject and many qualified consultants who can help in that regard. This chapter is designed to give your business a marketing edge when it comes to using a Web site and the Internet to spread your marketing message, educate your prospects, and convert prospects to clients.
The Purpose of a Web Site
Many small business owners were originally seduced with the notion that all they had to do was put a Web site online and wait for the phone to ring. When that didn’t happen, some became disillusioned and either left the Web or left their Web site to languish as little more than a place to collect dust. For a Duct Tape marketer, the primary purpose of a Web site is to act as a tool to integrate and connect all of your marketing communication and education.
The good news is that the educational content outlined in the marketing kit can be the perfect base of content for your Web site. You must drop that Copycat Marketing notion that tells you that you need a home page and an “About Us” page just like everyone else. The purpose of your Web site is to allow your visitor to begin the task of more easily knowing, liking, and trusting you.
Much like your marketing kit, your Web site can educate, persuade, and motivate your prospects to take action. But a Web site can also provide a much richer set of benefits as well.
Benefits of a Content-Driven Site
Awareness
These days you are expected to have a Web site if you are in business, and many prospects start their search for a new product or service before they ever pick up the phone. This is even true of prospects that are referred to you.
Shorten Selling Cycle
In many cases, with a rich content-driven Web site, your prospects may feel that they can trust you before they even meet you. I have dozens of clients that have found so many answers on my Web sites that they were ready to hire me the minute I showed up at their office.
Access to Your Information
A Web site offers your prospects access to your marketing materials whenever they wish. You can and should save the contents of your marketing kit online and direct your prospects to your Web site to acquire the information.
Tool to Refer Your Business
A content-driven Web site allows referral contacts to share a great deal about your firm by simply directing referral prospects to your Web site. In fact, a great strategy is to create a page specifically for this purpose. If you have a referral source that consistently refers prospects, you can even personalize a page on your site for them: “Welcome, friends of Bill Smith”
Automate Distribution of Marketing Information
As you will learn more fully in Chapter 12, a key component of the Duct Tape Marketing lead generation machine is to promote the distribution of free or low-cost information and tools that allow your prospects to get to know you. A Web site can provide a valuable interface for the automation of this process.
Capture Lead Data
When someone reads an ad on a billboard, they may make note of a service, but they may not need that service for months. By that time, your billboard is no longer in sight. One of the fundamental tools of a Duct Tape Marketing Web site is the ability to exchange premium information for the visitors’ contact information. Once you capture this information, you have the key to begin marketing to this prospect for months and years, assuring that your ad is top of mind when it’s buying time.
Your Marketing Kit as Content
Much of the content outlined in the marketing kit should also appear on your Web site. In many cases you may need to shorten some of the content as it is harder to read long blocks of copy on a computer screen.
I like to use the case statement as the home page content. Don’t waste this page with some sort of a “Welcome to our Web site” message. Hit your visitor with the most compelling marketing copy you have. After that, you can have some major components:
• Your difference
• How you work
• Your story
• Your ideal client
• Your products/services
• Case studies
• Client lists
As a rule, I like to sprinkle testimonials throughout a Web site. Even better, get an actual photo of your client to go with their testimonial or case study. There are a growing number of simple tools that also allow you to add audio testimonials to your Web site. Imagine the power of a client’s testimonial in his voice.
Search Is a Verb
Much of the power of Web sites as a marketing tool is being driven by the enormous growth in the use of search engines as a way to find products, services, and professionals. Even prospects that simply want to find a new auto repair shop in their town are turning to local search tools to locate local businesses.
While you may not have any dream of ruling the search engines, your business can benefit locally and nationally by adhering to a set of simple content, design, and search engine factors outlined below.
Seek Professional Help
There is no question that Web design, programming, and search engine technologies can be confusing. You may never have the desire to learn how to write HTML code or anything to do with how your Web site works. But your Web site is one of your most powerful marketing weapons, and you must be very involved in how it supports your business.
There are many, many very qualified Web designers and search engine experts. In most cases, your business will be better served if you seek out a professional to delegate this task. You cannot, however, abdicate this task simply because it seems too technical. If you do, you will wind up with an expensive Web site that does little or no good.
Learn as much as you can about the workings outlined in this chapter, and then go to a qualified designer with some very specific instructions. Make sure that you are fully prepared to discuss your ideal target client, competitors, Core Message, identity elements, and any Web sites that you like when you first visit with a prospective designer.
A Word about Design
Simple. That’s it. Keep your Web site design simple. You can create or hire someone to create a very professional Web site that is focused on getting your content found and read. Many designers have a tendency to overdesign. You need to balance the need to look good with the need for search engines to find your site and visitors to consume your content. Don’t present them with distractions.
Simple also applies to images. Search engines can’t see images and only view them by a couple of very simple attributes. Images can add visual interest, but keep them simple and lightweight.
On the technical side, look for a designer that is very fluent in CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) design. I don’t have the space to go into the full technical nature of this, but a designer using CSS for Web site design will be able to produce a site that more effectively takes advantage of the power of search engines.
Page Layout
Start each page with a powerful headline. Follow each headline with a highlighted introductory paragraph. Your intent is to grab readers and quickly guide them into the rest of the page.
Simple Navigation
At one time it was common practice to create images for navigation bars. Again, these images don’t help in search terms and can bloat the loading of the site. Ask your designer to use CSS techniques to create text-based but visually interesting navigation links.
Make sure that a six-year-old could navigate your site. In fact, that may be a good way to test it. Create links to every page and add text links within pages from one page to another to give the user lots of ways to jump from point to point.
Shoot Your Web Designer if They . . .
Suggest flash intro pages. These are pages that do all this really cool animated motion graphics and then present you with an entry or splash screen. Flash intro pages may be visual works of art, but unless your visitor came to your site to be entertained, they don’t really add any value and can’t be read by search engines.
Suggest frame pages. These are sites that often present right-side navigation in one frame and then main content in another. Again, this type of site design hurts your ability to be found by search engines.
Suggest templates. Web site templates can have some appeal as they are generally very inexpensive, but often they are heavy on images and don’t allow you to match your Web site look and feel to your other identity elements.
Expert Content Sites
Holly Russo of Wavian Web Design in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has another seemingly unrelated way to draw customers to her Web design business. She maintains a page about parakeets, a hobby of hers, on her business Web site. Although unintended as a marketing draw, she receives over five thousand visitors a month to her extensive FAQ page. Sometimes other bird lovers contact her through this page and end up hiring her for Web design.
Because of this, she often advises her clients to create informational pages of all kinds that help draw traffic to their Web site. Even topics unrelated to business can be used as a tool to gather traffic (www.wavian.com).
Blogs and Additional Sources of Content
Another way to enhance your Web site content is to take advantage of add-on technologies and resources.
Blogs
A blog is a diary-style Web page that has become very popular with business Web sites in the last few years. Blog software allows you to update and add content very easily. This can help you build a relationship with a loyal audience and give them a reason to come back to your site.
The often personal or specific nature of most blog content also makes them a great tool to extend and demonstrate your expertise on a topic of interest to your prospects. Most blog software allows you to very easily create and add content to a section of your Web site.
The best business use of a blog is to create a tightly themed topic blog for some important aspect of your industry or specialty and post deep amounts of information that will attract search engine interest and develop a following that cares about the content.
Dave Seitter, a construction attorney with a large Midwestern law firm, used a blog as the center of a construction-related portal called MidwestConstructionLaw.com. He found that the blog allowed him to easily post topical, even fast changing, information and draw search engine traffic far beyond that of a traditional static Web site. The site was crucial in positioning him personally as an industry expert.
Resource Center
Create and display content and links to other industry resources. Think about other types of products and services that your target market is interested in and provide lots of information on other Web sites.
Article Directories
There are any number of online article directories that allow you to search for topic-specific articles and reprint them on your Web site. This can be a great way to add depth to your content and give the search engines more reasons to find you.
Syndicated Content Feeds
Many publishers allow Web site owners to easily syndicate ever-changing content via RSS feeds. This technique allows you to publish up-to-the-minute news headlines, for instance, that impact your target market. Good content, ever-changing, keyword specific—all good things.
Creative Commons Content
A Creative Commons license is a tool that allows creators of content to place conditions on their copyright. Many allow you to make use of their content through this system. This includes images and content. Yahoo even has a Creative Commons Search Directory.
Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips
You may never actually get involved in the programming aspects of your Web site, but I think it is important for you to be aware of these basic terms and tips so that you can communicate their importance to your Web designer or programmer.
In fact, make a checklist of each of the elements below and question your designer’s intention to utilize each in your Web site’s design. You know you have a very good fit when you find a Web design firm that asks you about these elements up front.
Keywords
No matter what your business does, you must understand as fully as possible what terms your target market uses to find products and services like yours. There are databases that track the actual number of times certain search terms are used by surfers.
From these databases it is important that your Web page content, titles, and headlines contain the most important search terms. Search on the Internet for keyword database tools and you will find many varieties.
A good use of the idea of keywords is to think in terms of giving each of your Web pages a keyword phrase theme and then making sure that the theme phrase appears in a number of the elements introduced below.
Title Tags
Title tags are part of the HTML structure of every Web page. Think of them as the informal name of the page. Search engines use the content in a page’s title tag as one of the primary ways to categorize what the page is about. It’s an important page element, but many people waste or misuse it.
Use title tags or page names that are descriptive and search friendly. Instead of “Welcome to Bob’s Used Cars” for a home page title tag, use “The Greater Muskogee Area’s Best Deals for Used Cars Are at Bob’s.” The reason this is a better title tag comes down to how people search for Web sites. Unless they know the name of your business and search specifically for it, your company name as a page title isn’t very useful.
Links to Your Site
Search engines will give your Web site higher marks if they see that other Web sites in your related industry also find it worthy of linking to. Your site will benefit from trading links with like-minded businesses.
Don’t get caught up in the link farm, trading with pages and sites that only want links in quantity. Focus on sites that you think would add value for your visitor. Only contact sites for link exchanging if you are certain that the site owner provides high-quality content that is relevant to your business and your target market.
When I find a site that meets these qualifications, I try to write a very personal note to ask to exchange links. There are software programs out there that automatically look for linking partners and even send out generic linking invitation e-mails. To have any success with link swapping, you need to be very personal. Link to the site in question first. In your note include your reasons for linking, and state something you really appreciate about the link prospect’s site.
Anchor Text Hyperlinks
Many Web sites have links to other pages on their site such as “Home” or “About Us.” I guess that these links get the job done, but they don’t really tell the search engines about your site. Use descriptive text and search phrases for links. Use “Great Used Car Deal” as a link to your Bob’s Used Cars site or “Find a Construction Attorney” for your link to your roster of construction related attorneys
Use Heading Tags
HTML, the Web’s programming language, uses a series of H or heading tags to help structure a page like an outline: H1 for the most important headings, H2 for subheads, and so on. Each of your pages will do well to contain a keyword rich headline, much like an ad for the page, and H1,/H1 markup in the code to let the search engines know that this is a really important part of the page. Then, do the same with subsections with H2,/H2 tags. I know that most designers understand these tags when it comes to styling a page, but few get the important role they play in the search engine game.
Create Site Maps
A site map is a page that has links to every page on your site in a structured manner. Visitors may not often find much use for this page, but search engines may use this page to find and index all of your site’s pages.
Each of the major search engines has developed ways to submit and update your site map. If you work with a Web designer, make sure that you inquire about each of the above tips. Take this book with you to meet with your Web design firm and demand that they either address each of the elements in this chapter or explain why they don’t think it is important. The world of Web sites and search engines is a fluid, ever-changing world. You must constantly pay attention to the changing landscape or at least make sure that you are comfortable that your chosen Web designer is on top of the latest trends in Web design and search strategies.
Local Search Is Here to Stay
A rapidly growing number of people are using search engines to find local businesses much like people traditionally used the phone books. Every major search engine has rushed into this local search market and have created directories and search platforms focused on delivering local search results. If you want the best pizza in Cutbank, Montana, you search for “best pizza, Cutbank, MT,” and the search engines will deliver up three area pizza joints with phone numbers and maps.
If you have any desire to do business locally, you need to make sure that each of the major local search engines—Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask.com—has your business listed. Each engine has a unique process for registering. In addition to registering with local directories, there are a few things that you can do on your Web site to add local flair. Remember, someone searching for a remodeling contractor in Austin will enter “kitchen remodel, Austin, TX.”
Local Title Tags
This is probably one of the most important bits of information on your page, so make sure your title reads something like “YOURFIRMNAME Kansas City’s oldest bakery.”
Local H1 Tags
Make sure that your keywords for your site and your geography have H1 tags—“The Best Baked Brioche in Peoria, Illinois,” is an example of a local-based headline that you would enclose in H1 markup.
Content
Add your local address and phone number early and prominently to every page, and don’t forget to list the suburbs you serve. Look for ways to add local content of value. For businesses such as insurance, real estate, financial planning, and other professionals looking for prospects in local communities, lists of community events, senior activities, school districts, and church functions may be a great way to extend your business content into the communities you serve.
Local Internal Links
Make your internal links local friendly—instead of “Accounting Clients” use “Omaha Accounting Clients.”
Schloegel Design Remodel, a residential remodeling firm located in Kansas City, Missouri, found that when they featured their project portfolios with city-based link text they started to rank highly in the search engines for these geographically based searches. They used terms such as Kansas City kitchens and Kansas City baths for link text instead simply using something like our kitchens or our baths.
Local External Links
Another strategy for local-oriented businesses is to identify area businesses that may serve your target market or that your target market might find useful in some manner and build a local resource section on your Web site. After you build your mini local directory, invite businesses that you included to link back to your site. Don’t forget to include the name, Web site address, brief description of the site, and the city and state in your listings. These elements combine for some very nice local content.
Duct Tape Marketing Chapter Resources
Yahoo! Small Business - Small business Web hosting www.ducttapemarketing.com/yahoo.php
Action Steps
1. Rework your marketing kit content for your Web site.
2. Find a Web designer that understands search engine optimization.
3. Locate sources for additional Web site content.