A Comprehensive Guide to Online Presence, What website do I really need?

The Internet has been great in shaping our lives, especially the way we get information and how fast anyone from anywhere in this world can get information, communicate, and sell/buy services/products.

Here below we will go through a guide to online presence, especially on this part, we will see what website we really need.

What website do I really need | Digital marketing consultant

A website is the biggest sales tool any business should have. You see not all potential and actual clients will come to your store; a website is your online store. Not all potential clients are looking to purchase your services/products every time they visit your site, sometimes they are learning, researching…so your website is an educational/trusted information source.

Potential clients find websites when they are searching for particular services/products, less clients will search for your business name…your website presence is needed.

This simply means an online presence is not only about having a website, or having social media accounts, or having a pretty images on website or having referrals coming to your site, it’s about your website getting found on top searches when your potential clients are searching for services/products you offer.

Common Mistakes on website | A guide to online presence

Who is your customer? A comprehensive guide to online presence

The business owners know their customers in real life, but when it comes to designing a website they are likely forgotten. Most people design websites for themselves and not for their potential clients. The best way to think about your potential client before you really know what your website should look like, try to go after the services you are offering.

You are selling English classes online, so try to buy or just search English classes online.

One of the great features you will consider a website to be relevant and reliable to give you great classes online should be the great features of your website then.

Website stuffing |Common mistakes on website

Another mistake most of you guys do, is stuffing. What I mean here is trying to put everything on a small space of a website, while there is a chance of making great navigation and put proper pages.

Your homepage is of great importance guys, try to make it neat, Make sure you are taking your visitor by the hand. Make it easy for them to go where they want to go.People will not stay long if they are confused, they will just click back, and off to your competitors websites.

When I say stuffing look at the screenshot of this website, would you know it’s

a tourist board website?

Is the website space limited that everything should be on homepage?

Product/service information first |Common mistakes in web designing

The reason someone clicks through your website is that your website came up in the results page when they were searching for particular products or services. I would say here that your website promised the potential clients that whatever you are searching is on this website.

Is your services/products placed on the right place to be seen without the second click?

Is the services/products similar to what was promised before the visitor clicked your website

Look, I have typed Serengeti Safari… I am not going to click anyone of the results there as you can see are pay per click. But looking at them you will really understand the reason someone who typed Tanzania Safari will just hit a back button.

I think I am going further, but you need to know this, as other readers here are doing Google AdWords. If I click on the first results it will take me to Serengeti Page, the rest website links will just take me to a home page where I won’t get results of my original Google search unless I find a relevant link there to click.

Online presence, features of a great website.

I will just highlight some features of Great website for businesses owners but more emphasize on the eyes of visitors and the search engines.

Features of great website for Search Engines |A guide to Online Presence

Whatever we upload online, we just want the search engines to crawl and index them and bring as relevant results in the results page when the people search for those particular terms.

It might be an article, any document, image or video, in order to be brought up in the results page, the search engines bots have to crawl and index them, and then include them in search results for relevant queries

Architecture

Crawl ability, are pages crawled well? Rewrite urls etc?

Speed, is your website loading quickly?

Urls, are your website Urls containing meaningful keywords to page topic?

Html

Titles: HTML title tags contain keywords relevant to page topic

Description: Meta description tags describe what pages are about

Structure: Pages use structure data to enhance listing

Headers: Headlines and sub headlines use relevant keywords in headers

Alt tags: Images, Videos have alts relevant to our keywords and page topics

Keywords

Page targets a single searcher intent means one keyword

Primary keyword phrase appears in page URL

Images on the page employ descriptive, keyword reach alt attributes

Primary keyword phrase found in the body content

Descriptive anchor text is used in links pointing to the page

Key page elements

Title less than 75 characters

Urls less than 90 characters

Meta description less than 160 characters

Others

Mobile responsive site

Having a Google+ Publisher

Page Content Size at least 250 kb

XML sitemap

I just remembered I am not writing a tutorial guide about on page optimization, so I would say let me end the list of features of great website for search engines.

we are making websites to be able to increase sales.

Guys you already know that we are making websites to be able to increase sales. We are designing website to drive traffic to our businesses. We want people to come to our website, but the only reliable way of driving traffic is to be found on search engines results pages…at least with a proper on page optimization the search engines would consider your webpage.

In a nutshell, on page optimization for your website needs understanding of what you are offering, and make sure key feature of your website presents that.

Let me use this simple description

I have done a search on Digital marketing consultant, and took that screenshot.

The blue line is the title and possibly the heading of the webpage I will land to when I click.

The Green one, is the URL of the webpage where I will be going

And the black one is the description of what’s the page about

This serves more than one, a search engine to understand what is in your webpage, but also the user who is looking at such particular service/product they have requested.

The search engines have made it easy to scan the webpage before you visit, now I can judge before I click that this is what I wanted buy looking at the webpage title, then the Url if is leading to the content I want also through the description that must be summary of what is in the webpage.

Features of great website for Users |A guide to Online Presence

Guys after attaining the search engine intent, we need to think about the clients, I mean the website visitors. Oooh of course our visitors should be the center when we are designing the website and uploading information there, as it stays now, Google and competitor search engines are giving more power to websites that are answering users questions.

So what’s users’ questions a website should answer | A guide to Online Presence

Get in your potential visitors shoes to understand what they need, or just when you need something online is when you will realize how sweet it is if your website would offer the services/products as soon as your website visitor lands on your homepage.

Make sure your website is clean and shows the exact text the visitor needs to read or click.

Make sure your website main important information of your services or products are presented within 4 seconds a potential client is there. Here it would be better to present the product/service information even before a website visitor clicks or scrolls down.

Make your website supported by testimonials of your past clients; it might be video, audio or texts. We call that a third party endorsement.

Make sure there is a clear navigation and anyone can go to any page direct from homepage…People are impatient of clicking.

Make sure you have supportive images and videos on your website that shows or explains your services and products. Make sure your images or videos are showing the real experience of the services you offer. I reckon that most Tanzania safari websites shows animals, that’s a mistake because they are not selling animals but animal viewing as a service, so put the services.

Make sure your website speed is great, as people won’t be waiting for your page to load, instead they might press back button.

Your website should present product or service information in abundance, do not think they have nowhere else to go and read other websites.

For whatever information you put, be an authority, if people find your information irrelevant or not enough, when they hit a back button they will never come.

While they are reading your website, don’t forget to offer them free stuffs, it might be a sign up form to get information delivered direct to them, or an offer for a specific action they take

What website do we need |A complete guide to online presence

Having seen the on page seo and features for great website for web visitors, now let’s look on how to make our website compelling to visitors especially to stay long or for a return visitor which is more potential.

Look here;

55% of Visitors Spend Fewer Than 15 Seconds on Your Website. Should you care?

People Engage With Newsworthy Content More Than Evergreen Content

The first sentence shows us that website visitors are just scanning our websites within few first seconds, after that If they don’t see in reason of going on, they just hit a back button.

The second sentence tells us that the content that is more compelling to people is newsworthy not an evergreen, you wondering? That’s true because I am sure not all people will finish reading this, while it might be interesting at some point, but people will still skip it, unless it was hot news

Having said that let’s talk about Content Creation as we have been hearing that content is King.

Google loves Fresh Content, and so website visitors | Online presence guide

Guys Content Is a king but that don’t mean you design a website with a thousand pages in the hope that you will hit number one on search engines.

It also doesn’t mean that you have to write about the same thing in different ways again and again in the hope to fool the search engines, think about your visitors.

It does not mean all you need is keep creating content, without the readers’ intent.

What it means is:

Creating content will give your visitors values on what you offer

Content creation will boost the search ranking as the search engines prefer fresh relevant content

Content creation in a specific industry makes you an authority.

But with the increased ranking, you can see the image above; the organic searches contribute for about 51% of a website visitor, so having your webpages in good ranking will give you unlimited traffic to your website.

But guys think about this, how will a website without great content make a way to Google and still retain the visitors? It’s impossible to have great number of blog followers if you are producing less quality content.

But also it’s impossible to anyone to share your content if it’s a pure crap, hence make yours stand out.

The easiest way to create great content is read about a specific thing you want to write about from your competitors’ website, you will know how great yours should appear.

Understand that less than 50% of visitors on your website are ready to buy on the same day, they are just reading and researching, so make your content the best so that they should come back for a purchase.

Make sure you have (why, what how) as a guidelines before thinking that you need to provide a content. There is a better way of producing a better content, apply one.

You have a reasonable reason to producing content for your website, create it. Also if you are thinking on what to write about, think about what people might be interested top read about or on regards of the services/products you offer, you will get an idea. Also in any chance, if there is hot news about what you offer, get your computer and publish severally as you might get loads of traffic when the topic is hot.

Here below is a chat of Organic traffic sources based on industry, as developed by Bright Edge.

If you are in business services you need more organic traffic than any other industry, hence you need more great content. The organic traffic is leading, so invest in content guys.

Guys that is it for today, thank you for reading, I will appreciate and constructive comment on how we can help more business get a great online presence.

Talk soon

Dimmy