Put Your Business on the Web
the RIGHT Way!

Planning Your Website

Planning Your Website Why do you want a website?

A lot of business people decide to get themselves a website for all the wrong reasons - it's cool, it's hip, everyone else has one, and they're tired of people asking "what's your Web address?".

They don't ask themselves "what is the real benefit of being on the Web?", and "how will this website contribute to our bottom line?"

What is the real reason for going online?

You Must Have an Objective

Before you start planning your site you must decide what the objective of your site will be. Without an objective, your website will end up being just another me-too "brochure" style site that no-one ever visits.

Decide what you want your website to achieve. Is it a direct sale, a sales enquiry, to print a discount coupon to be presented at your bricks & mortar store, or maybe capture an email address with a newsletter subscription?

Once you have set your objective you can go about creating a site that will lead your visitor to achieve that objective. Don't overlook this first step. It's crucial. How many websites have you visited where the only message conveyed was "this is what we do", but you were left wondering "well, that's fine, but how will you help ME?"

Without an objective you can't lead your visitor down your carefully planned path and get them to do what you want them to do. Ken Evoy, in his book Make Your Site Sell, calls this your Most Wanted Response.

Of course there will be secondary, or back-up responses, but your goal is the get your MWR.

Got your objective?

Good! Time to start doing a little research on the marketplace you are about to jump into. Your business may be small, and locally based, but you are about to enter a global marketplace.

And it's HUGE!

You've no doubt read those statistics on how many new websites are created every day.

How will your little site compete?

Start by thinking about what search terms a potential customer would enter into a search engine to find information that is related to your business.

Remember, your potential customers are NOT looking for you. Most of the time they are looking for information, and solutions to problems. You need to get your business in front of these information-seekers, give them the information they are looking for and then offer them your products or services as solutions to their problems.

Occasionally, web users look for very specific products or services. For example, a person who searches for "best deal Nikon Coolpix 3700" knows exactly what she wants and is ready to buy. You can target these potential customers quite easily.

But a search for "product reviews digital cameras" was made by an information-seeker. They are not interested in how great your digital camera store is.... yet. Their mindset is - research. They want answers first.

Got your list of search terms? Go to Google and enter them in the search box.

See up the top where it says "Results 1 - 10 of about..." This is how many web pages matched your search words. How many page matches were there?

Welcome to Your Competition!

If you were lucky, there would be a relatively small number of matches, say under 50,000 (yes, that's small). But, if you chose a popular search term there could be several million or even hundreds of millions of page matches!

And you thought you had a lot of competition in the offline world! How on earth do you find your way to the top?

Before you leave Google have a look at the top 5 sites and note their URL. What did you like/dislike about those sites? What is their objective and would they have achieved it if you were a potential customer?

These 5 sites are your most important competitors. They know what it takes to get to the top so learn as much as you can about them. In the next chapter you’ll see that although there may be millions of pages matching your search (known as SERPs – Search Engine Result Pages) – your real competitors occupy only the first few pages.

Next - Choosing Your Keywords

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