A Small Business Website is Important. Make Sure It’s Done Right
A successful website is the backbone of a successful business. WordPress makes it easy to create, manage and run a successful website, as it offers an easy and useful content management system.
Unlike a cheap static site, WordPress was developed to help you reach out to your audience, and with a plethora awesome plugins to choose from, you can completely customize your site to meet your needs.
A successful site combines:
- Functional yet stylish design
- Regular updates
- The right target audience
Here are my top tips for using WordPress to run a successful website.
1. Functional, Beautiful Design
Your website is the online face of your company. If you want to portray a professional image, you should have your WordPress site professionally designed. Your design should reflect your company culture and vision.
A professional design ensures that your content is laid out in such a way that it guides a visitor towards the most important information on your site. The images and typography connect with your audience on an emotional level, which makes them more likely to follow through on your calls to action.
Using a Genesis child theme with your WordPress site enables you to customize it to showcase your individual style. Genesis is a powerhouse platform which adds even more customization options, along with being a fantastic tool to ensure your site meets the latest web standards.
2. Regular Updates Made Easy
Search engines love WordPress sites due to the clean code, and we love it because it helps us better manage time. WordPress allows you to schedule your posts for future dates. That means that you can write posts when you feel inspired, and schedule them for a time and date when most of your audience will be online.
You can even make it easy for readers to access more information by displaying a “latest posts” widget on your homepage and a “similar posts” widget on the post pages.
Other widgets can help you to add new content on a regular basis from your social media pages, thus letting the search engines know that your site is alive and well.
3. Reaching Out to the Right Audience
There are many sites that promise to help you reach a massive audience. However, if you fail to reach the correct audience (people who actually want to buy what you are selling), it will be a waste of time and money. Before you post anything on your site, it’s important to first determine who your target audience is. Your website’s design and content should be aimed at your audience.
Search engine optimization is the number one technique we use to drive traffic from unknown sources to our sites. Making a success of your SEO involves knowing who your audience is, and finding the right keywords to attract them.
There are many ways to share your content, the most popular being:
- Social Sharing
- RSS Feeds
- Newsletters
Once you have attracted the right audience, you want to find good ways to stay in their minds and for them to share your content with their friends. You can also encourage your readers to share your content if they find it helpful, valuable and interesting. It can easily be done by installing some of these plugins:
- Pay with a Like – Readers must like your post in order to read it.
- Social and Floating Social – Great tools to encourage visitors to follow you on social media.
- MailChimp – Newsletter platform and sign up form tools.
Now that you understand how these three elements work in harmony to help you achieve web success, you are off to a great start. How can we help you make the most of your small business website?