There are many reasons why your business should have a professional website. Typically the most important reason is to get new customers for your business and ultimately generate additional revenue for you and your business. That sounds great but it seems many people build a website and expect it will bring them new business. These days though there is typically more to it then that and there are some things you can do that will help make your business website more effective. The following are 3 essential ways of getting new customers with your website.

• Content is King:

These days if you want your business website to rank well in Google (which is essential to driving traffic to your website and ultimately new customers), fresh and relevant content is essential. If your business website doesn’t have a blog system built into it, it should. Even if you have one, if you aren’t regularly building fresh content (at least weekly), you are missing out. The bottom line, Google loves fresh relevant content – not to mention it will help add credibility with your customers. They will consider you to be an expert before they even meet with you face to face. Its worth noting to be careful to not go and copy somebody’s content and put it on your site. Not only is this copyright infringement if you don’t give credit to the original author it will actually count against you in the eyes of Google. Google hates duplicate content, it’s not worth the risk. A simple 500+ word article should be sufficient – you don’t need to write a book but make sure it’s relevant and of good quality (spell check, etc).

• Being Mobile Optimized:

Times are certainly changing and if you have a website that isn’t currently mobile optimized, you are likely missing out on business. In fact, as of this year (2015) more online searches occur using smartphones now then they do on laptops or desktops. This means potential customers are likely looking at your site using a smartphone. A mobile optimized website will make it simple for the potential customer to navigate the site and often contains buttons for “click to call” or “click to email”. Research has shown that most potential customers will go elsewhere if they have to put too much effort into using the site. Plain and simple your site needs to be streamlined for mobile use. If it isn’t, the longer you wait the more potential customers you will probably miss out on as more and more people become smartphone users.

• A SEO Optimized Site:

In addition to good quality and fresh content, having a “search engine optimized” (aka SEO) website is essential. There are a number of things you can do to make your site optimized for search engines – and most importantly Google. Unfortunately the algorithms are constantly changing and trying to stay on top of things can be difficult. A few tips though, if a business contacts you and promises to get you a “number 1 ranking” on Google, they are likely trying to rip you off. Getting a top rank on Google is not an overnight thing. It can take weeks or even months and in most cases somebody who really knows what they are doing. Thankfully, most of your competition as a local business owner hasn’t really mastered SEO themselves so sometimes just a few basic tweaks can help. A few simple things you can do include using relevant keywords related to your niche in the content you build, using tags (if you are using WordPress which is recommended in most cases because it is already SEO optimized to an extent). Other tips include not using flash on your site (since search engines can’t read it) and stay away from services like “Wix” simply because those sites rank poorly in search engines. Otherwise regularly building good quality content will put you ahead of the game in most cases – but it will take time to bump up your rankings.

At Omaha Computer Service Pros, we build professional websites that are “responsive” (the are mobile optimized and work well on all devices including tablets), SEO optimized and including a blogging platform to allow you to build fresh and relevant content. We offer a free consultation to discuss your options. Contact us today for more information!