Small and medium sized businesses, from sole traders to limited companies, are looking to the Internet to help drive growth. For many businesses, this translates into a focus on search engine optimisation to boost their website’s search rankings. Businesses often work with SEO agencies and many businesses can benefit from the different sorts of work undertaken by many of these agencies. In our experience, SMEs often aren’t getting the most from their money in terms of search optimisation. Optimally, a website should support a small business content strategy and help deliver customers. A site needs to rank well on search engines (and maintaining that rank). A site also needs to generate leads.
Goals of Your Small Business Content Strategy
- Drive visitors to your site
- Generate leads for your business
Small Business Content Strategy and Web Design
- Small business content strategy for search engine optimisation
- Web design with lead-generation in mind
- Web development with small business content strategy at its heart
We’d like to share our successful recipe for small business content strategy. Here, we will outline the concepts behind our small business content strategy. In a second post we’ll explain how that strategy has been applied to one of our customers.
What is a Small Business Content Strategy?
A small business content strategy includes techniques to create informative and ‘shareable’ content for the purposes of attracting new leads, converting leads into customers and engaging with existing customers. In other words, by creating high-quality, interesting and keyword-rich content it is possible to engage with your business’s community. Your business’s community includes prospects and existing customers searching for goods and services related to your industry.
A small business content strategy can work well with Google’s algorithm. Search engines like Google are always changing their algorithms. Google’s introduction of ‘freshness filter’ shows the importance of social media and a clear small business content strategy. Internet users want to read about what is going on right now, at this moment. This is clear from the links that get shared around Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. The content that is shared is highly relevant to a topic, rich in information and reflect the latest developments and trends. On the other hand, search engines can count the number of times content is shared on social networks and count this when calculating the ‘freshness’ of a piece of content. A small business content strategy works well with search rankings weights by the latest, most interesting content, as content strategy emphasises creating exciting, topical content that is appropriate for sharing on social media.
Web Design for Lead Generation
Attracting visitors to your site with a small business content strategy isn’t a trivial endeavour. It is so important that your site provides clear directions for your visitors to do *something* that creates a lead from that visit. It is vital that you define the most important thing for your visitor to do on your site. Once you know the most important action for your visitor to take when s/he hits your site, you can then work with your web designer to develop a hierarchy of ‘calls to action’ with your most important action at the top of that hierarchy. In this way, your web design can incorporate The Most Important Action and elevate access to that action above all else in your site design.
While some more complicated sites may have different most important actions for different pages or areas of the site, less complicated sites may have a single purpose and available action. For example, on a less complicated site, the goal may simply be to collect phone numbers/emails through a request for quote form while on a more complicated ecommerce site the goal on the product page may be to hit the ‘Buy’ button while the home page is more concerned to drive clicks on the latest products or sale items. When developing a website to grow your business online, it is essential that you understand and communicate The Most Important Action to your web design and development team, then they are able to offer design and technology solutions to ensure easy and prominent access to that action at the heart of your site.
Web Development for Small Business Content Strategy
A small business content strategy requires the regular creation of content. For this reason, small businesses should use a content management system to power their small business website. We love WordPress for small business websites. WordPress has great basic support for a small business content strategy. What’s more, there are a number of plugins, notably WordPress SEO, which adds enhanced SEO tools for implementing your small business content strategy. By choosing a CMS (content management system) such as WordPress to power your website, you help ensure your ability to develop a strong small business content strategy. By using WordPress as the software behind your small business’s website, you and your team can create and maintain a ever growing body of search-friendly content as part of your small business content strategy.
Interested in growing your business with a small business content strategy? We can help! We offer a range of search optimisation and content strategy packages. Get in touch and let’s work together.