In week 1 of our 10-week Successful Marketing video series, Allan discusses effective websites. He’ll guide you through the following topics:
- Determining Your Audience
- Website Design
- Blog or News Page (Content Creation)
- Search Engine Optimization
Effective Websites Key Points:
- Determining Your Stakeholder – there are three:
- Your Business: is this truly your most important stakeholder?
- Your Audience/Customer: what do they want? who are they?
- Google: writing with SEO in mind will point your customer to your website from Google or any search engine
- Website Design
- Less is more in terms of navigation and text
- Calls to action is how you can connect with your customer
- Keep your content up to date
- Story Brand: your website needs to figure out why someone is visiting, what problem they have, and how you solve that problem
- Blog / News Page (content creation):
- Keep it fresh and frequent
- Lower your bar – your post doesn’t have to be long
- Know who you’re writing for
- Search Engine Optimization
- Have a specific Keyword Phrase that someone might be searching for and use it multiple times in your post/on your page
- Make your pages and posts readable with bullet points and headers
- Download the Yoast SEO plugin to guide your SEO effectiveness
Our Presenter
Allan Wright is founder and president of Zephyr Conferences. He has been organizing these conferences, determining content, and securing speakers for 13 years. Allan also has 24 years of experience running his own small company and an MBA in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
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There’s some bad advice in here that maybe worked 10 years ago, but it’s not working now.
1) “Less is more in terms of navigation and text.” – Definitely not true if you want to rank well in Google. Less than 500 words of text makes it tough for a page to get on page 1 for anything besides the name of your business.
2) “Lower your bar – your post doesn’t have to be long” – See #1.
3) “Have a specific Keyword Phrase that someone might be searching for and use it multiple times in your post/on your page” – To a point this is true, but if you don’t mix it up with synonyms and natural language, it can get you penalized for keyword stuffing, producing the opposite effect.
In my experience, most brewpub websites are way too minimal, have very little information about the back story or the personnel, and don’t have nearly enough text for search engines to grab onto to rank them. They’re also missing contact information for journalists to get in touch and write about them, which is a giant wasted opportunity for publicity. At best they have a contact form (that nobody monitors).
Hi Tim,
Thanks for reading and commenting. I certainly agree there needs to be enough text for search purposes. In terms of the lower bar, my advice is to get people to publish something rather than to leave a news or blog page blank, which is what I often see. So better shorter posts than no posts.
Allan