If you should engage my services to help you develop your On-Line presence, following is the process I use, which also to your benefit, differentiates me from most others.
First, I look at your Web site from a marketing, rather than a technical aspect, to make sure we have the pieces in place and that the relevance* rule is followed. Only then do the technical aspects come into play.
Here’s a simple analogy. Your Website is the window into your business and as a window it’s only a portion, although an important one for your business. Similar to a brick and mortar business, the same major components come into play. Let’s use a store as an example and compare it with a Web presence:
- With a store you have a location and hopefully it’s a good location for your type of business. With the Internet you have your Web address or the URL as it’s called.
- Then you have your display window, whose purpose it is to have a passerby or visitor stop and be invited/enticed to come in the door. The Web page your internet visitor sees is no different. Its job is to entice the visitor to come in and take a look.
- Once inside the store you have the layout and the atmosphere, the displays and merchandise, the questions are answered, the value is established and hopefully a sale or a step towards one is made. The process is no different with the Internet, except that there’s no human interaction and everything has to be guided and communicated through your Web pages and content.
- Now, how do you get visitors to your location in the first place? With a store, at least in the old days, you used the Yellow Pages, the air waves, the papers and other print media and perhaps door-to-door. With an On-line business it’s no different other than the manner and media are totally new. For instance; Google has basically replaced all the phone books, directories, most of the radio and TV advertising plus, who knows. Today if you have a traditional business of just about any kind and don’t have a good Internet strategy your business will definitely suffer.
- Here’s probably the most important part as it relates to today’s marketplace. Because of the easy access and the flood of available information to your potential customer and visitor, your business is scoped out and evaluated on-line without any intervention from you or any other human, in addition, much of the control of how your site is viewed is in the hands of Google and other search engines.
The rules have changed, you don’t have the opportunity to talk or showcase your product or merchandise unless the customer is “looking for what you have”. Remember, that when a customer Googles, they are looking for something in specific such as “sushi restaurant that serves ahi tuna”. Google in return will look for the sites with that exact same phase or come as close to it as possible. Once they are at your site, all of the above points come into play. You need to get them in the door and make the sale. Now do you see how this can be challenging.
As you can see, although somewhat similar, it is a very different world out there today, and changing almost daily. Unless you understand it or work with someone who does, it can be an exercise in lost time, frustration, money and business.
I’d love to see if I can help you and then perhaps have the opportunity to work with you.
Note: Relevance means that the presentation, the message, the Keywords, the SEO, the copy, the marketing message and exposure are coordinated so as to achieve the desired outcome.