Welcome to the second part of Agile SEO Brisbane’s ‘Tips for Small Business’. If you missed Part I, you can read it here.  

After hearing 1 too many horror stories of clients whose sites have been hijacked and months of painstaking work undone due to a bad breakup with past SEO companies or a previous Brisbane web design company, we wanted to let small business owners know how to get their business set up and in such in a way as to help provide protection from malicious / unprofessional individuals.

In Part II, we’re looking at key points around your site content and architecture. As Brisbane web design specialists, we suggest that you keep the following in mind – especially when talking to your design team (if you have one) or while building your site yourself.

Part 2 – Next Steps

Site Content & Architecture

There are certain pages you just have to have –

• Location Page: this needs to include your business name, address, a map, business hours, contact info (phone numbers and email) and – preferably – a list of the areas your business services. If you have multiple locations, its best to create a page for each site which lists the different services each location provides and the areas each one services.

NB: If you make a separate page for each location you have an office / base, you need to make each page unique, duplicating pages (except for the suburb / city name) will have a negative impact on your ranking with search engines as they simply see duplicate content. Remember that computers aren’t smart enough (…yet) to realise that the reason the content is duplicated is because you intended to duplicate it.

• All Services Page: You need to list each service your business provides, along with a brief description and a link to each individual service page.

• Service Pages: each service you offer should have it’s own service page detailing what you do – remember this is part of what sells YOU, so take the opportunity to say why your potential client should use you and your product or service, rather than a competitor.

• Reviews Page: Collect customer testimonials! These are incredibly valuable to any business, potential customers love being able to find out what previous or existing customers think of your service so always allow somewhere to put these.

• Complaints / Feedback Page: Give your customers somewhere to complain if they need to, if they can complain directly to you, they’re less likely to complain elsewhere (like Face Book, which has the potential to undo all your good work if their complaint goes viral).

• Discounts / Offers: If you’re planning to offer special deals, have a page just for this.

• FAQ’s: As a general rule here at Agile SEO Brisbane if we get the same question twice, we add it to our FAQ’s page. This isn’t just because it helps prevent having to answer the same old questions over and over again. If you adopt the same policy, you’ll find that your FAQ’s page has the potential to become a popular gateway into your site. For example, if you run an IT company, most people will try to Google for an answer as to what’s wrong before they call someone to fix the problem.

Here’s an example of the above site structure:

Content

I can’t say it enough – content is king. Either blog or hire someone to blog for you. Google can’t get enough of fresh, unique content so you need to be posting quality content on a regular basis.

Each page needs to contain information that is unique and helpful. Do not copy content from elsewhere, search engines are very good at picking up plagiarised content and they will penalise you for it. Use actual search terms that real people are using throughout your content but only as appropriate – don’t try and cram key words into your text to the point where it’s ridiculous, readability trumps keyword numbers.

Each page should have a unique SEO Meta, if you’re using WordPress as discussed in Part I, this is easy enough to modify. WordPress comes with a range of SEO plugin’s that practically do the work for you.

Design Elements

Brisbane web design specialists agree that when it comes to designing a website, the hardest part for most people is thinking like a customer, not the business owner. Your site has to be easy to navigate so try to group similar pages together and make them easy to find – you don’t want a potential customer to have to hunt through your entire site to find your ‘contact us’ page. Ensure there are lots of visible call-to-actions to prompt the user to follow through.

What’s Next?

After you’ve built the site, submit it to Google & Bing, then open webmaster accounts with each. These are free and will provide a lot of helpful information. If you have hired an SEO company, they should submit your site for you.

Submit your site to Google, & Bing by clicking on the links.

Building a website yourself isn’t as scary as it sounds, sites like WordPress are designed to be easy to use while still producing great results. Additionally, there are a lot of great plugin’s that can make your life easier. If you’re not ready to design or build a site yourself and you need a Brisbane web design company, why not contact us today to see how Agile SEO Brisbane can help you get your business online.