To compete in today’s tight business market, you need a good, solid plan. How do you know if your plan is solid? For one thing, there should be a section of it devoted to marketing, and one of the biggest marketing boosts you can give your brand is creating an informative website that’s also user-friendly and, if possible, displays a little personality. Think about the way you look for information on a business. For most of us, we go to our smartphone or laptop and type in the name of the business, or even just the category of business plus our town name. So if we live in Portland and want to find a good donut shop, we’d type “Portland donuts.” Whether you’re selling donuts, diamonds, or dental services, you want to make sure potential customers can find you.
Make it local
Appealing to a local audience is super important. In fact, you may have even heard the type “hyperlocal” used in reference to organizations that really try to drill down on specific parts of their city or region, even going so far as to target specific neighborhoods. It’s all part of an effort to survive in an online climate where people have more and more distractions. People want relevant content, and few things are more relevant than seeing an ad about a new coffee shop opening up down the street from your apartment complex. After all, who is the coffee shop going to serve? It needs clients from the neighborhood to be viable. It doesn’t need clients from a town thirty minutes away.
Every market offers unique challenges. The world of search engine optimization, or SEO, is becoming increasingly important as well. SEO can get pretty complicated, but it basically works by trying to get search engines to favor your website or webpage over other, similar sites or pages. That means using certain words and phrases in the right way. It gets pretty technical pretty fast, so you’ll want to find people who know what they’re talking about and can explain it to you in a way that makes sense. Remember to think local, since the people you hire certainly will be. So if you’re in Denver, Boulder, or Grand Junction, look for Colorado WordPress and SEO experts. WordPress is a tool commonly used to build websites, so finding someone experienced in using it will likely make your life and business a little easier.
Make a sustained effort
When you go to the trouble of building a website for your organization, it’s absolutely vital that the website both stay up and stay up to date. If you’re running a restaurant, no one wants to view the summer specials in November, so make sure to have a team member or two that can post updates as needed. Think of your website the same way you think of your storefront or office building. You wouldn’t forget to pay your electric bill or water bill, and you also shouldn’t forget to make a payment every month to keep your website up and running. If people can’t find your website, they might simply assume you’ve gone out of business.
