Entrepreneurs often register a single domain name and launch a basic website, but here’s why your business’s web presence deserves greater thought and investment.
Out with the old, in with the new
In the days before the Internet, customers would find your business through printed listings. The Yellow Pages would list your business under a suitable category, and your customers would then ring you to find out if your products and services actually met their needs.
But in 2015, search engines are king, and now customers gather swathes of information about your businesses before they even make contact.
In the western world, a whopping 93% of business purchasing decisions begin with a search engine. That means, if you don’t have a website that ranks well in the search engines’ criteria, you are possibly only selling to 7% of the market.
Making all roads lead to you
Any web marketing expert will agree that purchasing multiple domain names for your business is a necessary investment. To many people, that sounds strange – if you have one website, surely you only need one address? But actually, there are good reasons for purchasing multiple domains.
Consider your web presence like virtual high street shops: the more addresses you have, the easier it is for your customers to find you. In addition to “yourbusinessname-dot-com”, consider URLs that describe your product or service. Some businesses even go so far as to register misspelled versions of their site’s address to increase the likelihood of being found.
So why is this necessary and why does it work?
- Multiple domains allow for multiple landing pages. These can be designed to communicate to different types of customers.
- More domains provide more keywords. This increases the options for what a customer can type into a search engine to find you.
- Google, Yahoo and Bing promote sites that have the key words in their domain name. If someone searches for “cheap purple gizmos”, Google will likely point them to cheappurplegizmos.com (if the site existed).
- As we shared a few weeks ago, registering multiple domains can help you protect your trademark.
- You can reserve names that future competitors might snatch and use against you.
Sites into sales
Investing in good copywriting and design is essential to making sales conversions on your website in the internet age. Prospects may browse your site as they would when window shopping in the high street, but you want to entice them to step inside and consider your product.
Ensure your branding is clear and blends well with the web design, and that you have plenty of attractive pictures/visual content, as images are proven to drive up click-through rates.
Content considerations
When writing content for your website, you must consider the tools of successful online advertising, too.
- Content must be optimised for search engines, so research keywords customers are using in your sector and blend them into your content.
- Link your webpages to each other and backlink any previous blog stories or other areas of interest – a lower bounce rate (people leaving your website after looking at one page) will increase your search ranking.
- Consider paying for Google Adwords campaigns to raise your website’s search ranking.
The more you can do to publicise your company and attract visitors to your website(s), the more your business will benefit in terms of customer base expansion and ultimately, sales conversions. It is worth putting in time, effort and money on domain and website development, as these form a crucial investment for your business, and will reap real rewards.
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