Why have a website strategy?

All large businesses have websites, most spend thousands of pounds in development, marketing, usability testing, optimisation and man hours to run high class websites. All these businesses know that through spending the time to research their market and plan their website will benefit them in the long run; be it in increased revenue from online sales or increased brand visibility. But what about the small companies, why should they invest in a website? How much should they invest and where should they look for help?

Lets face it, in these hard times it’s hard to justify spending money just to get a web presence, especially if the benefits are not obvious from the beginning. Many small businesses sell products or services to their local area, selling via a shop front of office to local individuals and businesses – do these companies really need a website?

The simple answer is no, not all small businesses need a website. However all small businesses should have a web presence. A business should be visible on the Internet: searching for your company name should bring up your contact details within a search engine’s results as a matter of course – the reason: if a potential customer is not able to search for your business and be presented a page with your contact details on so they can get in touch they may not be a potential customer for long.

“if people know you exist but cannot find you then you may as well not exist.”

Types of web presence

Your own website
Business listing on a business directory website
Business page on a social media website
Business blog

Having a website strategy for your business is as important as having a business plan. You should have a plan that will grow as your business grows. If your a very small business you may start with a free business directory listing or two, moving on to a small ‘brochure site’; your own website with your own branding that list information about what your company does, the products or services it provides and contact details so people can get in touch. As the business grows further you should plan for adding content to your website to keep it fresh and informative to your visitors, plans for the next version of your website should already be in place. By this time your business should be able to put more funds into your website strategy.

By analysing the data collected from visitors to your site you can get basic marketing information. You can analyse the search terms that your visitors have been searching on to look for trends, oftern this information can show what products or services people have been looking for – you can use this information in your website strategy to add new information on your most searched products or services. Analysing the pages people have visted will also allow you to see the popular pages on your site. (A lot more information can be gained from this data, but I am not going into the specifics in this post).

Once you have an understanding of what people are viewing on your site and searching for you can use this information to expand on your website. Adding infomation on your core products/services, and by using the data anlysed to add information on your popular website products/services you can increase the size of your website and focus on products/services that are of interest to your site visitors.

As your business grows your website should keep evolving.

Exaggerate a bit

Your website is your shop window to the world, it is your online presence, it is the landing page to potential business and needs to portray your business in a good light. If your company has a website that looks bad, is hard to navigate or simply does not work throught bad coding of the site then this looks bad on your company.

“if the invite was printed on toilet paper would you attend?”

Your website should look good. It should be easily recognisable as your company – branding and company colours should be in use on the site, your logo should be easily visible and your company contact details should be on every page.

But your website can also be used to make your company look bigger than it actually is, I’m not talking about pretending your a multi-million pound company when you actually turn over £40k a year, rather that your a bit bigger than you actually are. A company that turns over £40k a year could have a nice, simple website that portrays a turnover of double that (or more).