Creating Visits to Your New Website
I’ll build your 5-page website during the first month as a client of mine. I’ll optimize it during the second month and start promoting it during the subsequent months.
Build it
Most websites commence with only a few pages such as Home, Products, Services, About, Contact and Blog. These basic pages are familiar to most people that comes to your website to see what you have to offer, so it’s important to make it easy to navigate. Following the construction of the website, you can add 10, 20 or 100 blog posts without changing the basic layout. These 5 pages will be created during the first month without the blog posts, as the foundation, or shell, of your website.
We’ll build the website together, starting with the domain name. We’ll go through the available domains and I’ll buy the one you like most. Next, we’ll look through various free online templates so that you can choose your favorite color pattern, layout and overall look and feel. Finally, I’ll take pictures with you and change all the pictures on the template, change the logo and change the content to fit your company. From there, we start adding more and more content to the blog each month.
Optimize it
This is a buzz word in the web design industry because it sounds fancy and makes the person sound smart. Optimization is like a folder on your desktop called Pictures with well-organized folders inside to categorize your pictures into subsections. Vacations (Aruba, Mexico), Wedding (Ceremony, Reception) and Children (Under 5, Under 10). Could you imagine having 1,000 pictures all in the same folder with no labels? Your website is similar because your domain name is the root folder (yourwebsite.com/Vacations, yourwebsite.com/Wedding, yourwebsite.com/Children). Labeling all the pages specifically to your products and services is important because Google is crawling through websites looking for keywords like this. When 2 websites use the same keywords, Google looks at total visitors, page load speed, social media activity, etc. Building social media accounts comes in the promotion phase of building a website to show up in Google, along with creating more blog posts about your products and services. Optimization sounds complicated but organization and labeling is an easier way of understanding it.
There are several files inside my "SNHU" folder. Optimized and organized.
https://www.chrisbell.com/SNHU/IT-647-website-construction-and-management/website-management-plan-for-new-client.php
Promote it
Now that you have a 5-page website all labeled for Google to find easily, it’s time to start promoting your website for people to comment, like and review. We start by adding your website to Google My Business to show up in the local results, along with adding it to several other popular local directories. Then we crate social media accounts if you want them, but it’s not a “must” for small companies. Creating inactive social media accounts can hurt more than help, so if you’re prepared to add, edit, control, monitor and engage with your customers via social media it’s a great way of securing new business. The last approach is to write new blog posts, perhaps one per month. Each new blog post will provide 15-20 visits per month, so more is better, but quality is still first and foremost. The post needs to be at least 600-800 words in length with multiple original pictures and possibly a video to give the users a full view of the points you’re trying to make in the post.
I like to sit with each client individually to discuss a plan over the course of a year. If you hate the idea of social media and publicizing yourself, we can create a plan that involves much more blogging and very little “face time” from you. This is an understanding between us for me to work hard on your website, create visits and get you new business in the most comfortable way for you. I don’t force my clients to do anything they aren’t comfortable with.
