Small Business Website: Do you want it to look pretty or do you want it to work?
Above: Do you make your web designer do this?
So, I have a question to ask all of you small business owners–do you want a website that works or looks pretty?
That is the bottom line for today’s rant about how small businesses muck up their online presence.
I’ve just have to ask, if you hire a professional to do your web design, get a professional to do search engine optimization work, and rely on them to get the job done–why do you muck it up?
What I mean is, how much do you know about websites, search engine optimization, and web design?
The web changes so fast that you can’t possibly know anything about it unless you’ve studied the topic extensively–and then that is worth nothing if you have not applied it.
In today’s state-of-the-industry, things change daily.
Take the Facebook changes, for example. They make your head spin.
Anyway, I had to laugh when I talked to a friend this am who told me she finally understood how much she got in her own way when it came to the web.
Her story was a great analogy:
I now just think of the web as a great big ocean and my website is a very small boat in the middle of the ocean.
Nobody is going to find it without any help.
If I make my way into the harbor of search engines, at least I can be found.
But the dock has to be in the right location, the right size, and easy for people to get to.
The boat has to be stocked with supplies delivered in a timely manner, preferably all at once, prior to departure…and for the web that is content, images, etc.
If they want to get my boat out, guests need it to be easy–not a complicated process.
Plus, if I hire a Captain and crew (web design team) I can give them my ideal destination but I won’t navigate myself or dictate how they do their job to get me there.
I bring this up because I just finished working on a very large project.
Because I like to do a lot more than is expected, I added anchor links and email links–despite the fact that I hate having emails displayed for the spam bots to pick up.
HOURS of detailed research went in to identifying the right terms for the client and optimizing every little thing on the site.
The result?
They want to change things.
First, I want to say that I had to create a whole lot out of nothing–they had no content to speak of and the content they had wasn’t very good.
Also, when something is optimized–it is not just a simple change–it is a lot of work because it is analyzed from top to bottom and every element on the page serves a specific function to get the ranking for SEO. Changing it takes a long time, not just a quick minute or two.
They were not ranking for the terms they wanted because they were going too broad–loads of traffic doesn’t do you any good unless it brings your target audience and buyers to your site.
Plus, if you are a little fish in a sea of other, more attractive fish, you don’t end up very high in the search engine rankings.
Because they have no idea about how the web works they want to dictate how it should be done.
Okay, fine. They are the client–but then why bothering doing the SEO?
A website is not like print media or advertising--quite the contrary.
It is a three dimensional creation that will work in a variety of ways to get the right traffic to the right page.
Visitors don’t arrive on your main page–they often will land on the optimized page for a service or product you are selling because that is what they are looking for.
That is good!
Also, the words or phrases you think work–don’t usually work on the web.
How do we know this?
We spend hours researching about just what people are searching on so you get that traffic and the right people.
Just because X phrase sounds good to you, if it has zero traffic–it is worthless.
Also, if it has 5,000,000,000 or more results–you are likely not going to rank for the term with so much competition.
Uh, yeah–we look at all of that to pick the right terms and phrases to help you.
So, my message today?
You are investing a lot of money into your online presence, so let your web team help you!
Yes, yes, it can look pretty but it has to work…and unless you get out of your own way, it won’t.
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