How to Put your Website on the Map

Putting your website on the map = Achieving Search Rankings → drive traffic

A successful business isn’t built overnight. The same idea applies to their website. It takes considerable effort to give your website the memorable face it needs to impact visitors. Think of your your website as a dot on a map. As your website adds value to the map, its dot becomes larger. Website owners are responsible for maintaining websites that add value to the map called the internet. If your website adds no value, it passes into the infinite sea of generic websites.

What can I do to ensure my website does not fade into myth?

Work. It takes complex and precise work to create a website that provides value to an audience. The work comes in the form of market research, web design, development, content creation, optimization, and outreach. If your job is to maintain your website, then you may have time to do this yourself. For a business owner who requires a turnkey solution, it’s unlikely you’ll have time to do any of this while operating your business. For established businesses, hiring a full-service digital agency is often the best answer to an important question:

How should I grow my business online?

If your business is new to the web arena, putting yourself on the map starts out with the basics: research. Market research has become far more powerful thanks to the evolution of digital marketing and its niche aspects of SEO, PPC, content marketing and more. If you think your website can succeed without tapping into the web’s collective opinion, just take a look at the web’s major players. Their reputations are built, spread and maintained by their audience.

Between social media, search engines, and news sites, you can see quickly that the most popular content is shared easily and spreads rapidly. The internet’s collective sentiment can make or break your business. There are many examples that highlight the power of the online tide. Just Google search for “River Bluff Dental,” or “Amy’s Baking Company.” Those are just two of the businesses who have faced ruin at the hands of the internet. But researching your audience and knowing their needs won’t automatically put you in the history books.

When does my web design affect my audience?

From the moment your website is clicked on, visitors are evaluating your website. The experience your business offers to visitors on your website is just as important as if they’d walked into your office themselves. Your website’s design should be comparable to the design of your brand. Not sure how good design impacts your visitors? Consider the success of sites like Paypal, eBay and Amazon. These websites are designed to offer specific value to visitors. Web design impacts your audience from the moment they choose to visit your site. It gives them an impression of your business, its message, and the experience you’re offering.

A website design for a business must effectively portray the business’ image, mission, products and services in a concise format for your audience to navigate. You must know how websites are used in order to design them. How your audience interacts with your website is also how they engage with your business. Your website’s interactivity is heavily dependent on its functionality.

What can I do to improve the functionality of my website?

Good web development is about precision, clarity, and efficiency. Your website should precisely deliver a clarified and efficient message. A talented website developer can take a designer’s assets and transform them into a fully interactive and engaging website. Unless you are a developer or your business is a web development agency, it is unlikely that you will be developing your own website.

Improving the functionality of a website requires an understanding of where it may be deficient. To a user, a button may not be working, or some of the page features appear broken. When this problem is brought to a developer, troubleshooting begins. Depending on the nature of the issue, this troubleshooting could be simple, or it could take hours of developer time. If you are operating a business, you won’t have copious time to wait for your website. You don’t close your store during business hours to change a lightbulb. Hiring a skilled web development agency ensures your website is developed properly, and remains fully operational, but there still needs to be valuable content for your audience to read and share. If you aren’t exactly a grammar expert, using a writer is a safe bet.

Why hire someone else to write content for my website?

Not everyone is a writer or an editor. As a business owner, you know your business. That is not a question. But, do you know copywriting? It has principles and practices just like any other industry, and to write content that follows those practices takes time and skill. Hiring a writer to create content for your website is a great way to ensure your business’ message and goals are delivered to your audience in a way they can easily grasp.

Good writers use all their information sources. They will often ask a set of prepared questions to help them gain an understanding of your business prior to writing. If the writer is working in parallel with a marketing campaign, they will also consult with your marketing experts to learn about keyword targets, product names, descriptions and other optimization items. It is your website’s duty to offer value to its visitors, and the bulk of that value is going to come from your written content. If the quality of that writing is poor (or worse, plagiarized), your website’s traffic and rankings will suffer. Thankfully, following proper optimization best practices will ensure your site lands squarely on the map.

How do I optimize my website to attract more visitors?

This question is one of the most frequently asked questions among designers, developers and digital marketers. You can optimize your website to rank well on search engines for valuable terms, while also leveraging your website’s blog and accompanying social media accounts to increase the size of your online footprint. Putting your website on the map means creating a site that is worth visiting for search engines and people alike.

Optimization is a phrase that describes the application of market research to the technical and creative aspects of your website. To “optimize” a website is to ensure it can be properly read by any person or search engine encountering it. This includes ensuring your design is easy to follow, your development is clean and precise, and your content is properly formatted based on market research. For the site’s visitors, they will see carefully crafted title tags, H1 tags, meta descriptions, content and more. You must know your target market if you want to accurately target them. Once you know who your market is, and you’re targeting them effectively, it’s time to reach out.

Where does “outreach” figure for my website?

Finding out how to share your beautiful, functional, optimized website with the rest of the web can be a daunting task for any business owner. It merits a book unto itself, considering the nuances and numerous strategies available. The easiest way for businesses to start promoting their website is via social media. Creating business pages on various social media channels and using them to interact with your audience is simple, and fun for many people. Social media offers an outreach opportunity enabling you to directly interact with your audience on a personal level. This humanizes your company in an increasingly automated world, making you incredibly attractive to the average consumer.

The internet loves any CEO who takes the time to genuinely and thoughtfully participate in the ongoing social media conversation about their company, products and services. The internet despises fake public relations teams and scripted responses, and they will always know the difference. Gabe Newell, CEO of Valve, the company responsible for the world’s most popular online gaming platform, has written himself into history with his outreach to the PC gaming community. He offers a few pieces of valuable advice to business owners seeking to put themselves or their business on the map:

“The internet is super smart. If you do something that is cool, that’s actually worth people’s time, then they’ll adopt it. If you do something that’s not cool and sucks, you can spend as many marketing dollars as you want, [they] just won’t.”

What do I do to ensure I end up on the map?

To securely pin yourself to the map in today’s web-driven economy, your business needs to offer value to its audience through its website. If you miss the mark on that with your first website, you and your marketing team should analyze your pitfalls and redesign the website to perform better based on that analysis.

A full-service digital agency like Bigfoot has the team and experience to complete the work required to put your website on the map. From your first idea to the launch of your website and beyond, Bigfoot’s guidance will help you take your business out of the woods and turn it into a local legend.

To learn more about how your business can achieve legendary status in your industry, contact Bigfoot Web today.