As a manufacturer of windows and doors building a website isn’t something you do every day. It’s no small task and it’s hard to know where to start.
Research has shown that companies can run into trouble when they haven’t considered important aspects in the planning phase. We have put together a list of things to consider when planning your website, to ensure you are building an online presence and the implementation runs smoothly.
1. Understand your target audience
In the busy world we live in, websites need to grab someone’s attention and engage with them. This means understanding who you are targeting and what their circumstances are. Are they a business, a consumer or do they want to buy from you and on sell? What problem do they have that you solve?
The answers to these questions will assist you frame your messages on your website, chose your layout, write content and choose the most appropriate images for your website.
For example, if your target audience is high-end home renovators your website would talk about how your windows are the ones that will transform their house into a home and how you take the stress out of renovating. You would also include images of beautiful windows in a home looking out to a beautiful view. Think what you offer them that no one else can, to make your stand out in the marketplace.
2. Conduct a competitor analysis
Conduct some research on your direct competitors. See how they have positioned themselves in the market, who they are targeting and what their messages are. This is not to copy what they do, but to help you work out your point of difference and a way to standout in the market.
The competitor analysis will help you with your wider marketing and sales efforts too. This is a great article to learn more about why to conduct a competitor analysis.
3. Choose which platform to use
This basically means how do you want to build your website. Do you want to use a content management system or use code to build it? It’s hard to know what to do if you haven’t had any experience in this area.
Ask yourself, do you want to be able to go in and add a new page or amend a mistake on the website? If the answer is yes, you want to be able to change things then consider getting someone to build your website using a platform like WordPress which will allow you to make changes and add new pages easily.
When deciding on the platform ensure the platform is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly, otherwise people will never find you through search engines like Google. Some platforms are not SEO friendly.
This article further explains how to choose the right website platform for your business.
Note: we are not affiliated with WordPress.
4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and keyword searches
As we already touched on SEO in #3, we thought we should talk more in-depth about it now. What is SEO? It is the way of increasing the quantity and quality of people to your website through search engine results.
SEO is the the art of getting your website to the top of the rankings for phrases you want your website to rank for. SEO puts your website in front of people, when they are searching for a product or service. For example, you may want people to find your website then they’re searching for ‘best window manufacturer Baltimore’ or ‘bi-fold doors Sydney’.
This means putting things in place on your website to make search engines love it more. With 3.5 billion searches conducted every day, you don’t want to be missing out on some of that search traffic. If done well, SEO can deliver a lot of traffic to your website and help drive sales.
The following things will help you rank highly with search engines:
- how your website is built. Ensure your platform is SEO friendly as mentioned in #3 of this article.
- include relevant and engaging images, content and videos on your website. Google will crawl the content, images, files and see whether there is duplicate information, relevant keywords and descriptions which all help your rankings.
- links from other websites to your site and vice-versa. For example through blog posts, news articles, media releases.
- interactive and fast site to keep people on as long as possible and to click through to other pages. These all help your rankings.
If you’d like to read more about SEO check out this guide put out by Moz.
We have covered a lot in this article about the important aspects to consider when building an online presence. There are a few more things to consider which will be covered in part 2, coming in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!
