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How do I attract customers to my website?

Shot of happy and successful business colleagues giving high five in office after attracting customers to their website

Every burgeoning business needs an online presence. Bringing your business online means you can massively grow your potential customer base, as well as giving you the opportunity to stand out amongst your competitors with a slick website. Already got your website made? Then you’re halfway there! The next step is attracting customers to your site, and we have some useful tips for you on how to do just that.

Not got your website made yet? Visit our site builder here and get started! 

Design the perfect site

One of the most important aspects of your website will be the web design. A well laid-out, easy to navigate online store demonstrates professionalism and reliability to your visitors. You don’t have to be a web design pro to help your online business flourish. Go Sitebuilder boasts a huge library of website designs that help you easily build your website exactly the way you want it.

High quality descriptions of your product will also convey professionalism to potential customers visiting your eCommerce site. Sprinkle some key words and phrases that people would search for in your product descriptions to ensure that visitors stumble upon your website. 

Product photos are just as important as product descriptions; professional-looking photos of your products show a degree of credibility to your online store’s visitors. Make sure they show all aspects of your product and that you have at least two or three images for each one. 

When creating a website for your business, it is important to create a domain name that reflects your brand. Ideally, you want your domain to match the name of your company. This reinforces your brand and makes it easier for customers to find you and return to your online store. 

Understand the power of social media

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. The list of possible social media platforms available is exhaustive. Share a link to your new website across all of your personal social media accounts to increase traffic to your store. Networking on LinkedIn, at both a personal and company level, will also be a valuable tool in promoting your business.

Don’t just rely on personal accounts, as it can look unprofessional. Create social media accounts for your business as well – social media is a great way for your business to interact with potential customers online. Maintaining a regular flow of updates helps to keep followers informed about your business, as well as bringing a sense of personality and approachability to your brand. As many as 80% of users on Instagram alone follow at least one business, so this is a channel you should definitely be exploring. 

For each of your business social media accounts, make sure you have a link to your website in your bio, as well as sharing it in individual posts.  That way, every time someone visits your page, they will always see a link to your eCommerce site first.

As well as helping your customers stay abreast of your business, social media is a great tool for learning about your customers. Using analytics (usually built into the platform) to stay informed of your customer base’s interests, demographics and what time they are online, can help you to create content valuable to them at times they’re most likely to see it.

A blog is a great platform to allow customers to keep up to date with any news or updates from your business. Sharing a link to your online store throughout your blog is an absolute must if you want to drive up clicks. Remember to keep up a steady stream of updates in order to build a bigger following. With Go Sitebuilder’s fully integrated blog platform you can get started on yours right away.

Promote your business everywhere

A bulletproof way of ensuring people hear about your new online business is to tell them about it. Simple, right? Tell your friends, tell your family, tell anyone who’ll listen. As long as you keep talking about your online store, people will keep hearing about it.

Post in local groups to get your website in front of a relevant audience. Most towns and communities have dedicated Facebook groups for their residents to post in. Utilise these to keep everyone in your area informed about your business.

If you’re using Facebook as part of your social media strategy, then you can reach potential customers through Facebook’s targeted advertising, where adverts for your website will appear in front of your target audience. You can apply the same principle to Instagram, who are also under the Facebook umbrella, but you’ll have to do some research to work out who is more likely to buy your products.  

For local businesses, registering your business with Google Places is really handy as it means it can be found more easily with Google searches, as well as ensuring it appears on Google Maps. Yahoo! and Bing have similar business databases which are also well worth signing up to.

The only thing left to do…

…is get your website started! We hope you’ve found this blog helpful. Make sure to let everyone know that your website is up and running and your online business will be flying!

Get your website set up now – Register for a 14 day trial today and see how our website builder can help you create a beautiful, professional blog hassle-free. 

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How do I get my new website noticed?

Male photographer on a laptop making a website

There are few things more upsetting than spending the time to make your website look beautiful and then realising that nobody is visiting it! But don’t worry – this happens to the majority of small businesses as they find their feet in the digital world, and there are multiple ways to get your new website in front of as many eyes as possible. Using a website builder like Go Sitebuilder can help you create a professional-looking website simply and easily, so you don’t spend too much time on the web design and can focus on the more important parts of your business. 

Unless people have your domain name noted down somewhere, the way they are most likely to find your website is through a search engine. Google is by far the most popular, with over 70% of the world’s online searches going through their site, and we are going to look at some Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) tricks that will help Google both see your new site and rank it higher than others. 

Get your new website indexed by Google

When you first click “publish” on your site, you might find that it doesn’t come up when you Google it. This is because Google’s crawler bots (which read your site and decide where it should rank) haven’t got round to indexing your site yet. This means the only way to find it is to put in the exact domain into the search bar on your internet browser. 

There is no set deadline that Google says it will index your new site by when it has first been published, but the average time is from four days to four weeks. However, there are a couple of things you can do to make it easier for Google; you can verify your site on Google Webmaster Tools, and submit your site to Google. We are going to look at other ways to make your site rank better on Google below. 

Research and use keywords on your new website

What is your company about? Brainstorm some words that accurately represent your company and the products or services you provide, so that when Google indexes your site, it will be easy for it to know what your new website is about. It’s a good idea to focus on a niche here, rather than something very broad, as it makes it more likely to stand out against the competition. 

Research the keywords you’ve come up with and run them through Google Keyword Planner; you want to use keywords that are high in search volume (so lots of people search them) but low in competition (so not many other websites are using them). This way, Google’s crawler bots will see your site as more relevant and rank you higher for those specific keywords. 

Create unique content

The content you have on your site, whether that is your web copy or your blogs, has to be unique and not copied from another site. This may seem like a no-brainer, but Google has indexed hundreds of millions of websites and can immediately tell if you’re copying and pasting from another source, and will penalise you for it. 

The best way to do this is to create a blog. This is a double win, because if you publish content regularly, then Google will re-index your site regularly, and rank you higher for being up to date. It is also a good opportunity to get backlinks, which is where external sites link back to your website because they value your content. Look for fresh, interesting ideas and unique ways to approach common issues, and put in the time to create content that is valuable both for your new website and your audience. 

Get your own url and publish it everywhere

This is not a moment to hide under a bushel! Take your new website’s domain and add it to your email signature and your business cards. Upload it on your Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin profiles, and get friends to link their contacts to it as well. 

Although it may be tempting to start your new site with a free website builder, they are unlikely to give you your own domain name, instead giving you a long and complicated url like this: www.websitebuilder.com/yourname/yourwebsitename. Difficult to share and even harder to remember, this is a sure-fire way to show potential visitors that you are not committed to your new website. With Go Sitebuilder, we not only give you your own domain, but we also give you five personalised email addresses to make you look even more professional. 

Getting your new website noticed can be difficult because there are so many sites out there! But if you do your keyword research and put some time and effort into creating high quality unique content, you are well on your way to having a Google friendly website. And don’t forget to advertise your site wherever you can!

If you’re still looking for a website builder with excellent web design that needs no coding experience, we designed Go Sitebuilder especially for you! Our ready to go web design templates mean you can have a stylish and professional new website up and running in moments. Why not try our 14-day trial today to see what we can do for you and your business?