Why have a website?
Creating a website for your business is a great idea. Not having one at the moment is to take the risk of losing a large share of the market. Because the Web is now a very powerful prospecting site. Think about it! What do you do when you want to buy a product or use a service? You start by searching on Google or another search engine. Well! Know that your customers and your prospects are doing the same. Not being visible on the Internet is, therefore, depriving a very interesting clientele.
Web Design Agency: A major asset
A website is not done in a day. This is a job that takes time, but also skills. Contrary to what some platforms suggest, creating a free and easy website is not necessarily a good idea. Because the mere fact of owning one is no longer exceptional: many companies have a website. The big challenge is to create one with real goals and a strategy to achieve them.
Applying to a web design agency is, therefore, a real asset for companies wishing to develop a good website, which will allow them to distinguish themselves from their competitors and to be important on the Internet. Thanks to our web design agency, you can enjoy the benefit from the expertise of our Web professionals who will realize for you an effective communication and marketing strategy.
Website creation: The 5 questions to ask
Creating a website is not an innocuous gesture for companies. It requires careful thought, even before it starts. To help you, GNM Web Design agency has decided to take up 5 questions that you must ask before starting your project.
1) What are the goals of your website?
For an Internet site to be effective, the first thing to do is to determine its role, that is to say, the objective (s) it pursues. Based on these objectives, you will then create an adapted and measured communication and marketing strategy that will allow you to reach them easily.
What goals can be attributed to a website? They are many and varied and can, in some cases, be combined.
- Selling your products and services online
- Increase your brand awareness
- Present my company and my products/services
- Acquire new customers
- Build customer loyalty
For each of these objectives, a specific strategy must be put in place. For example, if you want to retain your customers, you can create a blog on which you regularly publish relevant tips that will make them want to come back regularly to read new ones. Or you can set up a personal account system that allows customers to identify themselves to follow an order or have benefits.
2) What are the important keywords for your business industry?
In order for your website to be visible, it must be well positioned in search engine results like Google, Bing or Yahoo. And for that, two solutions, usually worked together, are available to you: you can optimize your site with SEO and create SEA campaigns (Google Ads).
For both, it is necessary to determine keywords relevant to your industry. What is it about? A keyword (or a key phrase) is a set of words typed by a user in the search bar of Google, Yahoo, Bing… It allows the user to navigate among thousands and thousands of internet sites that exist on the Web and thus obtain the most relevant answer for its query. It also allows search engines to understand the content of a site and, thus, to reference it when someone searches on the subject.
But how to determine the keywords used for your website?
You have to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and determine what they could type in the Google search bar to find your services or products.
There are tools created specifically to do this work, some of them are free, others are paying (examples: Moz, Keyword, Answer The Public, Google Ads… ).
3) How does the competition work?
Another important point is to follow the level of competitors on the Web. Are they real competitors, hard to beat? Or, on the contrary, going past them will not be so complicated? These are questions you need to ask yourself. The interest of a web design agency is that it can achieve for you a competitive study. The objective is to determine the best and worst practices of your competitors and ways to distinguish yourself from them.
It is therefore important, even if you use a website design agency, to think about the competitors of your website yourself. Be careful, however, not to limit yourself to the competitors you know. The best referenced on important keywords are not always the ones we think about in the first place. Broadening your competitive analysis is therefore essential: you must also find out about companies that you do not know but which are well referenced on the keywords that interest you because they are also part of those you have to beat.
4) What budget do you want to spend on your website?
By going through a website agency, you will necessarily have to pay a certain amount for your website. One of the very first questions you have to ask yourself is about the budget: how much are you willing to pay to have a good website? The price of a website depends on many different data: the type of website it is about (e-commerce, showcase site… ), the number of pages, the writing or not of the website content, hosting or not the site, the chosen features, etc.
And what about price differences between agencies? How is it that some web agencies request a larger budget than others to do the same job? If it happens sometimes that the price is indeed excessive, it may also be that it is a question of quality. There are agencies that are lowering their prices, but they are also less efficient. While others are more expensive but get better results, sometimes simply because they spend more time on the project than the less expensive ones that must still be profitable.
5) Are you ready to get involved in the project?
Creating a website, even though a web agency, takes time and asks for your inputs and some of your staff. Why? Because there will be meetings and exchanges of emails, that you will have to devote time to write or re-read the contents of the site, to check if you like the design of the site… And the implication does not stop only in the project. Digital transformation inevitably leads to changes within your company. Even when your website is online, we must continue to work on it:
It must be updated because a website with outdated information does not inspire trust and therefore cannot be effective. You have to answer the leads, the orders… that the website provides you so that the SEO of your website remains optimal, it must be constantly reviewed: it is necessary that your home page moves regularly, hence the interest of having a blog whose latest news can be found on the home page; if you have a blog, you have to keep it with short and long articles at a steady pace; depending on the competitors, you must also change your own pages a bit to stay on top; etc.
All of this requires the implementation of an internal strategy, which you must keep to ensure that your website meets the objectives you had previously set.
Conclusion
If a company wants to be as efficient as possible, neglecting the Web is a serious mistake: the Internet is now a great source of prospecting and not having a website is to risk not touching a large part of your target audience. Not only do you need to own a website but you must also make it effective. It must, therefore, fulfill specific objectives and follow a long-thought-out strategy to achieve them.
However, a website remains an investment in time and money. Before creating or using a web design company, you must ask yourself different questions that will allow you to see more clearly in your project.