Develop a successful website

BootCamp RESOURCE - Session 3 Develop a successful website How do you set up, maintain, and drive traffic to your website with both your communications objectives and your customers’ needs in mind? In this third session, we learn tips from David Haddow from Social Shifters and Lisa May from In The Retail to better understand customer journeys, their needs and expectations on the web, and the best practices to follow on your site.

Meet the ‘Hu nte

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Your website works hard on your behalf, it’s the one place that your target audiences and customers engage with anytime, anywhere (even when you’re not working!). It is a reliable window for them into your brand, products and services, so it’s important to get it right.

• A good website is geared towards your audience so it could be speaking more to your stakeholders, your beneficiaries and if you sell products and services, your customers. It should offer a great user experience to them with information that is clear and easy to find.

• You should aim to make your website discoverable (found easily with relevant search terms and SEO), accessible (functional, easy to read and to navigate for different audiences) and usable (a user can complete the task they intend to do on it) to help it find its audience.

• There are two main types of users on the web: ‘Hunters’ and ‘Browsers’. The first get to your website knowing exactly what they need and the latter are just browsing relevant content and open to be engaged but not sure what their exact needs are at this time. You should cater to both.

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‘Hunters’ are online visitors who have an idea of what they want to purchase, so their goal is to quickly identify the products and services that are the most relevant to them. To meet their needs and expectations on your site, you can: • Show positive reinforcement such as customer reviews, ratings, and social comments, to build trust and credibility that takes them over the line to purchase from you.

• Offer alternative suggestions by interlinking listings with relevant product options to make it easy for them to compare what’s on offer.

• Keep product titles and descriptions simple and to the point, choosing keywords that are the ones they would naturally look for.

• Set up a search bar and filters that make sense so they can look up products and services in your directory easily.

• Read this blog article by Dreamhost: “10 ways to make your website more accessible.”

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BootCamp RESOURCE - Session 3

Meet the ‘Browsers’

‘Browsers’ are not in the frame of mind of buying your product or service immediately; they are on an exploratory journey to find information, are open to inspiration and have the time to engage with you. To meet their needs and expectations on your site, you can: • Focus your efforts on your ‘About us’ section to really share who you are and what drives you, being personable and human while introducing your unique selling points, what sets you apart.

• Create content such as blog posts that are relevant with your brand, products and services and balance helpful and valuable information with more promotional information. Ideally, you would need to publish one blog post every week to help with your SEO, but you can keep them short, reuse content across platforms or even interview others on your blog.

• Include imagery through photo galleries, inspiration sections, sliders, or even lookbooks and brochures that are visual and easy to scroll through while providing information. These can be thematic or seasonal for instance, to help you introduce new customers to your offering in a soft way while offering inspiration.

View a range of paid resource guides on the online customer journey by Lisa May here.

How to be foun d

Google algorithms determine how your website gets found when users search for content on the web and there are different elements that are taken into account to assess which links are the most relevant to answer users’ search queries: • How your website is built and how users engage with it matters. For instance your content architecture, what information robots can find on your pages, if it’s content that is helpful and regularly updated, how much traffic and users your site gets overall, and if there are trustworthy websites linking to it (backlinks).

• The keywords you use across your URLs, page titles, photo descriptions and content are also taken into account. It’s important to try and set up a list of relevant keywords for your industry that your users would be likely to search for on Google. Without stuffing your content with keywords, you can use this list to help guide your web content strategy and check they are peppered through your website, including your key pages content (which is less often updated) and the SEO snippets for your pages.

• Regular social activity and posting on social media with content that links back to your site also tells Google that you have authority in your field and regularly engage with users around key topics, and that you’re therefore a trustworthy website.

Contact the speakers: david.haddow@socialenterpriseinstitute.co hello@intheretail.com

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