Photo by Luismi Sánchez on Unsplash
“Build it, and they will come” is a phrase that conjures up effortless success. It’s a misquote from the 1989 film Field of Dreams, and has become a mantra among business owners setting up their first website. As a plan, though, it falls apart the moment you launch, because your brand new site is a needle in a haystack.
Around 252,000 new websites go live every day. So if you want people to find yours, you'll need to help them. Marketing your products and services is only half the job. Your website needs marketing too, and that comes as an unwelcome surprise to many people.
Your digital shop window
Before we talk about visibility, it's worth a quick look at what you've built, because your website should be the sum of a few important parts working together.
Your branding wants to be consistent across logos, colours, photography and fonts. The design should speak to the people you're trying to reach. Navigation needs to be simple enough that a visitor can buy something or contact you in a click or two. And your content should lead with your customer's problems before it talks about you.
Assuming all that's in good shape, now the real work begins. (If you haven’t sorted the website yet, talk to me.)
Helping people find you
A beautifully crafted shop window is useless if nobody walks past, so this is where most of your effort will go.
Start with SEO. Google (and other search engines, and also increasingly AI services) works by referencing the text on your website. One way to make sure you are referenced more often is to publish more content, and that means writing a blog.
Publishing useful content, in the form of articles that answer the questions your audience is typing into Google, is what pulls people in over time, so it's worth checking those questions have real search volume behind them.
There are many free tools to help with this. Google Trends shows how topics change over time, and is useful to gauge whether subjects are trending or declining. AnswerThePublic visualises questions and related searches people make around keywords. Ubersuggest’s free tier helps you with keyword suggestions, search volume and SEO difficulty (if you are thinking of running Google Ads).
There are also many paid tools: Ahrefs, Semrush and BuzzSumo are all excellent tools for discovering search volume and intent, and for article planning.
SEO is a big subject, and the more advanced tactics, like link building, pillar content and schema markup, sit beyond most business owners, myself included, so this is the point to bring in an SEO specialist rather than guess your way through it.
Social media could be worth a look too, as long as you treat it as social. Pick one or two platforms your customers actually use, post in your brand's voice, and spend more time talking with people than broadcasting at them. A feed-full of sales posts and nothing else rarely wins anyone over.
It’s worth noting that most social platforms today depreciate you posting external links to your website. Together with plummeting reach rates across the board, this makes social media, in my opinion, a poor marketing choice for most small businesses. Use it if you want, but don’t make it your only marketing channel.
Email still outperforms most channels for what it costs. Offer something worth having in exchange for an email address, then keep in touch with the occasional newsletter or offer. Most people read their email on a phone, so design for small screens first.
Paid digital advertising buys you visibility quickly, if you have the budget. Google Ads and social ads let you target tightly, although they'll empty your wallet just as fast while you're finding your feet. Start small and test as you go. For Google Ads especially, it's worth using a certified specialist rather than feeding the machine your money to learn.
Whatever you try, keep half an eye on the numbers. Google Analytics will show you which pages and sources actually bring you enquiries, so you can put your effort where it's paying off.
Don't forget the offline world
For all the focus on digital, the real world can give your site a nudge too. Add a QR code and your web address to your business cards, your signage and anything you print. And it's worth pointing people to your website whenever it comes up in conversation. A website nobody knows about may as well not exist.
It's not like on the TV
You've probably seen the ads from the big website builders, iOnos and the like, where a business throws up a site and is suddenly swamped with eager customers. Real life rarely works like that.
Your website is a marketing tool, much like a brochure. Print 20,000 brochures and leave them boxed in the garage, then you've wasted your money. Launch your website and tell no one about it, and you've done pretty much the same thing. Google will lend a hand once your SEO is sound and you keep adding content, but it won't do the work for you.
Marketing your website takes steady, patient effort, and for a lot of small businesses that's more than there's time for. Plenty of people can help with the parts that matter most.
My own work is website design and the writing that goes on it, making sure your site says the right things clearly and brings the right people in. For the specialist corners like in-depth SEO and PPC, I'm happy to point you towards people I trust.
So if you'd rather not tackle all this single-handed, that's what I'm here for. Drop me a line and we'll work out how to turn your new website into something people actually find. Build it, market it properly, and you might just find yourself saying "I built it, and they did come."