Your virtual shop on the internet – why your business needs a compelling website

It’s important for individual businesses to have a website to compete in today’s market, but it has to be more than just selling a product or service. It has to offer quality information and provide expert assistance, because every visitor to a website is a potential customer. Make the most of the opportunity when visitors land on your website and entice them to spend more of their valuable time exploring it.

The overall appearance of a shop’s window can entice someone to walk through the open door, to look at your merchandise, and to ask a helpful assistant for guidance. That person may walk out again without purchasing anything, but if the shop’s image and the assistant have done their combined jobs well, then that visitor might come back with the intention to buy. Or that visitor might recommend the shop to other potential customers.

Your website or online business has to do a better job to draw potential customers in than a brick-and-mortar store in a busy shopping centre. It’s a lot easier for a person to click onto someone else’s website than it is for that person to leave a shop when the assistant has been helpful and friendly.

Your website has to look impressive and be interesting to hold the visitor’s attention long enough to get that person to delve further into your site, to click on each web page, and to explore your merchandise or services. A friendly virtual assistant’s pop-up box may appear on the website ready to answer any question, but your visitor may not want to use this function. It’s up to your website to anticipate questions and have those answers ready on various web pages. It has to provide interesting and useful articles; to point out the pitfalls and solutions to problems; and to provide free knowledge on your products, services or industry.

Boost your business’s success with quality content

Visitors who land on your website already have an interest in your products or services. It’s vital to the success of your business to turn that interest into sales. A well-presented website and superb content will help you to get there. But what if those visitors don’t know that you exist? They typed a general phrase or keyword into the search engine and peruse the results.

Therefore, your content needs to contain possible words or phrases that someone might use to search. This method (Search Engine Optimisation or SEO) helps push your website closer to the top of the first page, and ultimately has visitors clicking on your website instead of your competitor.

To illustrate the importance of the right content on your website, read this scenario:

Imagine a row of shops along the side of the road. The shops continue further than your eyes can see and they’re all selling the same products or services that you’re interested in. You (as the potential customer) glance at the first shop front and – if it’s appealing – you enter the shop, have a look around and perhaps chat to the shop assistant. You might be tempted to make your purchase with that seller, or you might check out another two or three to compare prices. How many of these businesses would you intend to check out before time becomes a priority, or you simply get tired of looking? There are many other shops along that same street, but you don’t bother looking at them.

Let’s change that scenario slightly, so you are no longer the potential customer, you are the business owner. Now, imagine that you owned one of those shops, and it was further down the road where few people still have the determination to keep looking? How many sales would you be missing out on?

Like those first few shops on the street, websites on the first page will be viewed more often. Many surveys have already shown that many people will not venture beyond the second page. All the others are lost in obscurity.

The information provided on your website has to be quality information, not just to entice your visitors but so the search engines work for you. Web crawlers have come a long way over the years. They are not interested in websites saturated with repeating keywords hidden in the background; they search for quality information now, and websites that provide valuable information will jump ahead in the search engines.

BES writes quality content from provided notes and a brief. We can research additional information and incorporate it in the finished product. BES can also edit your existing website content.