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3 Steps To Your First Small Business Website

Topic: Business DevelopmentBy Mark W Lamplugh JrPublished Recently added

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When planning your first small business website built by Influence Media Solutions in West Palm Beach, Florida, there are three essential questions you should ask yourself: Who is your target audience? How will your target audience find you? How will you convert your visitors into sales? These questions sound obvious, but it's incredible how many people don't bother...and then moan that "our website doesn't bring us any business." 1) Who is your target audience? Give a great deal of thought to your target market. Whom do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer to that is more than likely to sell them something - a product, a service, or an idea perhaps. Claiming that your market is anyone and everyone is far too vague, and your website will lack focus, and fail to maximize its potential. Ideally, it would help if you were aiming to create a niche. How will they find you? Creating a niche will also help you with the search engines, and drive hot leads to your site. Consider what keywords your target market might type into a search engine to find you. Influence Media Solutions (https://influencemediasolutions.com ) can help you choose those keywords when building the website. Also, do the searches yourself. Who comes up in the top 30? Because that's where you need to be. Are your competitors there? Look at their sites. Do they work? How can you improve on them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest. Those keywords - or critical phrases to be more accurate - need to be incorporated into the pages of your site - in the page titles, in the headings, and the internal links. Be specific with your key phrases. They will be less competitive than the more general single word searches, and will more accurately target your market. You may have to localize or specialize in getting in that top 30 - and the top 30 is where you need to be to drive traffic to your site. As I am sure you are aware from your own experience, if you haven't found what you are looking for in the first three results pages, you look elsewhere. The key to achieving high search engine rankings is building inbound links to your web pages - that is pages on exte al websites that link to pages on your site. Crucially this link acquisition should be a natural growth - where inbound link count increases at a gradual pace. The pages that link to yours should be relevant, on-topic and ideally contain the same keywords - especially in the linking text. Search engines rank pages based upon their reputation - your ranking will be determined by what other (preferably high ranking) pages say about your page. How will you convert your visitors into sales? Don't just tell them what you do or sell. Tell them why they want it (yes, want - not need). Offer incentives, freebies, discounts - anything to get that dialogue started. Current research indicates that the human brain makes a judgment about a web page within a twentieth of a second! That doesn't leave you very long to make an impression. So, make sure that you have your Unique Selling Point (USP) visible on your home page - and preferably prominent on every one of your other pages. After all, it's not a given that the home page will be the first page that the visitor sees, mainly if they have found you via a search engine. Then make sure that you list your bullet-pointed guarantees. Visitors have to understand why you are different from the rest, and why they should deal with you and not your competitors. Moreover, as we've discovered, they have to understand this pretty much instantly. Lastly, make sure that your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your relevant pages - usually the "call to action" or purchase pages - and make sure all roads lead to those pages. Your internal links - like their exte al equivalents - should describe the target page. If you sell blue widgets, don't call your products page "Products," call it "blue widgets," and make sure that the links pointing at this page also say "blue widgets." This will not only help the search engines identify and rank the most important pages in your site, but it will also lead your visitor to that all important conversion. Influence Media Solutions in West Palm Beach, Florida believes the website is the foundation of your business. When building the website, they keep your marketing objectives in mind. Even though Influence Media Solutions (https://influencemediasolutions.com ) builds websites in West Palm Beach, Florida, they help business and non-profits nationwide with their social media, marketing, website, branding, seo & PPC as well as public relations.

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About the Author

Mark Lamplugh is a fourth-generation firefighter and former captain with the Lower Chichester (PA) Fire Company. Mark is President of the board for the Institute for Responder Wellness. Mark owns Influence Media Solutions (https://www.influencemediasolutions.com) which is his own Marketing, Public Relations, Digital Marketing, Branding, Business Development and Social Media company. He advises companies such as Fountain Hills Recovery & Lionrock Recovery about first responder programs.. He just published his first book “Beginners Guide to Digital & Social Media” which is available on Amazon. Mark is a professional advocate for the behavioral and mental health of firefighters and other first responders. He’s been involved in the creation of several responder specific treatment programs and is one of the leading experts in bringing these programs to responders. Lamplugh hosts his own talk show called "Firefighter Wellness Radio". He has published dozens of articles on responder wellness topics and is recognized by the American Acadamy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. He has helped hundreds of responders with getting help for behavioral & mental health issues. He can be reached for comment at ceo@influencemediasolutions.com

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