• Can your potential customers find you?
• Is your website easy to navigate?
• Do you want your customers to be able to purchase products
• Can you track their activity on the site and so identify weak spots?

This is the single most important feature of your website – it MUST be search engine friendly. Countless books have been written on the subject of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and hundreds of companies make a healthy profit advising you on the best strategies. Some simple pointers that your website should include are as follows.

Write a descriptive title for each page of five to eight words, removing as many ‘filler’ words from the title such as ‘the’, ‘and’, etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. No one is ever going to search Google with your product code, so a numeric page title is not desirable! A good example is: http://www.silkpromotions.com/products/name/bespoke-cd-case-desk-calendar (title text: Bespoke CD Case Desk Calendar – Welcome to Silk Promotions)

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialise in USB drives, and that’s what people will be searching for, don’t just use your company name ‘Demo Distributor’; use ‘USB Drives – Demo Distributor’. The words people are most likely to search on should appear fist in the title.

Make sure your key words are in the first paragraph of your body text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document – where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. Don’t overdo this, however – 1.5% - 2% density for a word that should rank high is the optimum amount.

Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important so hyperlink your important keywords. To emphasise it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase, such as usb_drives.html – another clue for the search engine.

Include a Site Map on your website. And avoid JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover over them – great for humans but search engines don’t read JavaScript or Flash.

Ease of navigation

It’s surprisingly difficult to be objective about the layout and navigation of your website, as typically you were there at its conception, and for you everything seems perfectly logical! However, your potential customers have extremely high expectations of your website, and very little patience, so making sure that it’s genuinely easy to find what you’re looking for is a must.

In the first instance, ask someone completely unrelated to your company to conduct a series of tasks for you on your website, such as ‘find a red pen under 50p’ or ‘send a quotation request for 500 engraved hip flasks’. The tasks should vary in difficulty, and should recreate a typical user’s experience of using your site. Then sit down with your guinea pig and get their feedback – were they able to complete all of the tasks? Was it easy? How long did it take? You’ll be able to build a much better picture of your site’s actual ease of use in this manner, and if you use family and friends it’s completely free!

Don’t ignore their feedback. As a rule of thumb your pages should be a mixture of text and images which clearly signpost the user in the right direction. Categories and pages should be listed on the left, or along the top of your website – or both. You should certainly include a powerful search function – there’s nothing more frustrating than an ineffective search – and do have ‘product of the month’ or a similar featured item on the front page which you change at least every other month. These are very effective at stimulating interest.

The power to purchase

A lot of companies in this industry simply have a catalogue style website – where customers can browse the products available, but to get a quote or place an order they have to email or call you. Quite frankly this is missing a trick. Busy executives with a tight deadline don’t necessarily want a conversation. If you really want your website to make money, you should consider what your potential customers would need in order to make a purchase without contacting you.

If the customer is new to you, you will need to be able to process debit / credit card purchases. This isn’t prohibitively expensive; you’ll need an Internet Merchant Account from your bank, and a Payment Service Provider (PSP). There are lots of these about – your best bet is just to search for PSPs on the internet and compare rates and benefits in order to select the right one for you.

You’ll then need your website to support the PSP; this can be costly if you’ve had an entirely bespoke website built for you, but there are specialist websites available for the promotional products industry which come with this capability built in. Visit www.quickorder.uk.com for more information.

Your website should also allow the customer to upload their artwork at the checkout, again cutting out a level of administration for you and saving you time and money. If they’re an existing customer you might want to allow orders on account, perhaps even with customer special pricing – again this can be complicated in a bespoke site, but there are solutions available if you look for specialist websites for your industry.

Lastly, why not introduce Virtual Sampling* to your site? This technology allows your customers to select the product they’re interested in, and upload their logo to provide a realistic depiction of the finished article. Virtual Sample will even change the logo so that it mimics the appropriate imprinting style, e.g. engraving, screen printing, embroidered etc. If your customer can ‘proof’ their own product then you’re going to save time and money getting a sample from the supplier – and the customer will appreciate the convenience.

Tracking customer activity

One of the most neglected elements of marketing your business through your website is control. You need to be able to view the number of visitors to assess whether your SEO has been effective. The more you know about your visitors’ behaviour, the more you will be able identify areas for improvement. What’s wrong with that page? Why is it turning people off? Armed with this information you can experiment with different styles and content in order to maximise the amount of time potential customers spend on your site.

You can spend thousands on website design and consultancy, and it won’t necessarily be wasted. But it is important to remember that there are far more affordable and potentially equally effective means of improving your visibility and useability, and thus enjoy greater profit and reduced administration.

Contact: Liz Allen, marketing manager, Industry Software

Tel: 0870 922 4056, Web: www.industrysoftware.co.uk

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