So you’d like your web site to do lucratively. You’d like it to score good search results and change plenty of clicks into actual transactions. Well, you are not alone – not by a country mile. You’re in the company of thousands of millions of other companies, who all want their websites to perform the same trick. You’re in straight competition with thousands of websites that vend precisely the same product as you do. And yet some web sites usually seem to come out on top. How?
You know how good business people are supposed to show a certain number of recognisable behaviours – the habits of profitability? Your site wants to be doing the same thing. Each successful website shows a set of techniques behind it which mark it out from the competition. If you intend your site to work with the best of them, you have to understand how they operate.
Money for nothing: doesn’t happen on the net
You won’t get any traffic only because you build a web site. Customers can buy wire netting anywhere they want.
The world wide web is really extremely huge – and it’s stuffed, literally bursting, with businesses and sites who vend exactly the same stuff as you. If you accept it as is, as a bet the world wide web is defunct. It’s hopeless. There’s no way you can build a website to sell a service and just expect people to come after you.
No – the primary and most important behavour of best performing sites is this: do anything you need to pull your market through your portal. The best tactics right now include geography specific marketing, which ignores the worldwide landscape and locks on getting customers in your neighbourhood; and the long tail key phrase, which ignores general searches for your service and focuses on specifics instead. Both, by whittling your area down to well honed slots, guarantee that you’ll bring in a proper amount of profitable traffic through your site.
Become your product
Your web site won’t find modern plumbing apprenticeships unless it looks, to search engines, as though it supplies it. There’s all sorts of trends that have to be observed on line, if you want to score.
Every web site is made of bits and bytes.That code mutates often – and if it doesn’t change in line with today’s search engine “modes” then your web site is going to drop from grace. Think of the trends in programming as fashions in clothing or hairstyles. A skinhead gives off one sign; a gingham dress another. A search engine “sees” your web site by looking at its code first. If the programming “looks” obvious, i.e. describes what it is, then your site performs well in results tables.
The aspect of your site is paramount too. Customers are afraid of websites that don’t appear or function as they expect them to. Whatever you vend, you need to be sure that your site appears and runs in the same way as all similar web sites: else no-one will stick around long enough to buy.
Successful existing sites
For an outstanding example of fine marketing and good design, check this out.
You can identify the marks of good practice immediately. Slick design, easy navigation and a superbly delineated targeted service. Unless you are one of the few multinational super sites, then your website needs to present and work like this one. It needs to be sharp, obvious, simple and targeted at the customers who are sure to take what it vends.
The first attribute of top performing sites is this: recognise your limits. The net is not the wide open field of eager buyers we all used to pretend it was. It’s a choked, sprawling mess of a huge marketplace that can’t work at all without that you define your limits and live inside them. Our example site has done exactly that – and it’s harvesting considerable benefits. You could be, too.