What Every Business Website Needs To Succeed In Sydney

Building an online presence isn’t just a good idea in today’s digital age. For businesses big and small it’s one of the most important strategic moves you can make. For a lot of people, a business doesn’t really exist until it at least has a small presence online.

What does that mean for your business?

Gone are the days of traditional advertising and a storefront being enough. You need to have a website, and more importantly, your website needs to stand out and be effective enough to attract attention away from your competitors.

You don’t just need a business website. You need a great business website that’s perfectly tailored to your business needs.

That might sound like a tall order, but it’s also the bare minimum businesses need to stay competitive in today’s hyper-digital and highly competitive online world.

The problem is that it’s common for businesses, especially small businesses, and startups, to make a lot of mistakes when they’re designing their websites. A bad website can hurt your business almost as much as not having one at all. It’s important to get this part of your business strategy right and to get it working for you as soon as possible.

Don’t worry though, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get started.

Here are some of the tried and true strategies that can help you build a successful business website that helps you achieve your business goals from day 1.

Building a website that will work for your business means using the best of Sydney web design techniques and expertise. These tips are the kinds of things website designers in Sydney are thinking about when they plan and build a website for their clients.

Using these tips will help make sure you’re on the right track and give you a much better chance of creating a website that works for your business.

The first step in any venture is having a plan for how you’re going to make it happen. Saying that you want a website and knowing what that website needs to be able to do and how it’s going to help your business thrive are two different things.

Does your website need to be able to handle the demands of online retail? Is it there mostly to give people access to your business hours, and contact information, and to provide a list of your services? Do you need your website to actively help you cultivate new customers and raise brand awareness?

All of those things require different kinds of web design.

Of course, a good website can have different goals and may need to be able to handle more than one of those overarching business goals. But you need to know why your website exists before you can build an effective website. Most Sydney web design agencies won’t even start on a project until they have a solid idea of what kind of website is needed and what the company’s long-term goals for that site will be.

Remember, even your earliest web design efforts need to be working toward a pre-determined end goal. Don’t wait until you’re partway through the process to decide what your website is going to be. Have a plan, and have an end goal describing what your ideal business website would be and what it would do for your business.

One of the most common mistakes we see in Sydney web design is making your website too complicated and difficult for potential customers to navigate. While a complicated design can sometimes give you more functionality, it’s going to turn customers away more often than it’s going to attract them to your business.

Why?

Because people don’t want to spend a lot of time searching for the information they need.

Ideally, your customers should be able to find whatever information they’re looking for on your website within 3 clicks.

That’s a high bar to meet, and sometimes it won’t be possible, but that should give you a good idea of how simple your website should be.
Cluttering a business website with too many functions, menus, or pages nested inside of other pages makes it harder to navigate and will turn customers away and make them lose confidence in your company or brand.

As a business, it’s important to keep your website as simple and easy to navigate as possible. It’s one of the ways you can tell customers that you know what you’re doing and that you’re willing to put in the work to make their lives easier.

Social media is everywhere, and you need to be on social media as a business. Even if you’re only leveraging social media to post your latest blog updates and alert customers to new sales and promotions, that will still help your business grow.

Social media can also be one of the better places to gather testimonials, learn more about your audience and what your customers are looking for from your business, and to respond to customer problems, and turn negative interactions into positive ones.

There’s no reason to avoid social media and hundreds of reasons to build a presence there.

Make sure your social media accounts link back to your main business website and consider including your social media pages on your website as well.

The more time a customer or potential customer spends engaging with your brand media the more likely they are to buy from your business.

Another key mistake businesses make is that they either don’t put out any web content at all, or the web content they produce isn’t designed to meet their audience’s needs and interests.

Bad content is a little better than no content at all, but good content is miles better than either.

Blogging as a business is a way to stay in touch with customers, let them know key information about your brand, and help keep them up to date on what’s happening in the industry and how it might affect them.

It’s also one of the most powerful ways you can create a brand identity that really tells your audience why they should work with you, and what your company has to offer them.

Remember, your customers want to come first. Writing engaging and interesting content that meets their needs is one way you can prove that you’re putting them first and that you understand what they need and are expecting from your company!

Don’t worry. You don’t need to post every day like a successful blogger. Businesses, especially small businesses, can usually get away with putting out new content once a week or once every other week. And if you can only write new blog content once a month, that’s still better than nothing.
Figure out a content schedule that works for you, build a habit of sticking to that schedule, and you can work up to releasing more content later. Assuming you need to.

Not sure you’re up to producing your own blog and web content? Consider working with a web design agency in Sydney to create the content you need. That way you know it’s high quality, designed to work for your business, and written with the best SEO practices in mind.

Understanding your audience, and understanding what your audience is searching for and what searches might lead to your business is key to getting your business off the ground and making your website successful.

Keyword research helps you capture more searches, and attract more customers, while also making sure you’re putting out the kind of content your audience wants to see.

Quality content can only take you so far if you aren’t showing up when your audience searches for businesses like yours. Keyword research is how you make sure you’re showing up when your audience is searching for you. It can help inform your content strategy and is key for making decisions moving forward on your website.

Google is one of the most powerful tools you have for getting your website noticed and getting a larger audience or raising brand awareness in your community.

The problem is that everyone is competing to get noticed on Google, and Google only wants to show the best possible websites and resources to its audience.

So, what is a new business supposed to do? How do you get your website noticed and on the first page of Google where it’s most likely to be seen by your audience?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!

One of the most important things web designers in Sydney do is help with SEO. SEO is how you tell search engines what your business is about and the quality of the website. Keyword research is a part of search engine optimization, but how you use the keywords, how quickly the site loads, and other techniques all help make sure your business website gets noticed online.

There are a lot of different strategies for SEO, but it’s important to make sure your SEO efforts are working and that you’ve chosen the right method for your business’s website.

Speaking of keeping track of your SEO efforts, Google Analytics gives you a powerful tool to see exactly how your website is performing and where you can still improve. They can give you insight into your current search engine ranking, how many people are seeing your website, and whether they are staying on the website or bouncing off and going to a different site.

Remember that building a website following can take a long time, and SEO is a slow process that makes gradual improvements over time.

Having a website design company in Sydney to help your website thrive can make a big difference, but it will still take some time to make progress and get your site ranked.

The good news is that Google Analytics has all the information you need to help fine-tune your SEO and other web design efforts, and can make it easier to see when things are starting to work.

You can also access information about which users are accessing your site from a computer or on mobile, approximate locations, and other important information to tell you where your audience is and how to optimize for the audience you’re hoping to win over.

Having a content strategy is a key part of making sure your website succeeds. A good content strategy can help educate your audience about your brand and the products you offer, how they can make better use of your product, and more.

The problem is that you need to have a strategy that helps move customers in the right direction, from less informed to more informed, and from unmotivated to buy to very motivated to buy.

Having a content strategy helps make sure what you’re putting on your website is what your audience is looking for, and that each piece of content helps get your audience more invested in your brand.

That means including things like sales funnels, information campaigns, and advertising and social media content in your strategy.

The more detailed your content strategy is, the easier it will be to tell when you’re on the right track and make sure your new content lines up with your goals for the business and website.

Give Customers Opportunities To Leave Reviews!

Reviews and testimonials are some of the most powerful things you can have on your website. The more information your audience can get directly from your previous customers the more confident they will be when it comes to buying your products and services.

Reviews and testimonials aren’t as hard to get as many businesses seem to think, you just have to be willing to ask and make it as simple as possible for your customers to leave a review.

That means prompts, email reminders, and other processes that make it so that your customers only have to press a few buttons. Reminders help because everyone is busy these days. Even if your customers intend to leave a review, they often will forget before they actually sit down to write one.

So, remember that giving your customers a couple of immediate opportunities to leave a review or a testimonial, and a couple of reminders, is a good thing!

When it comes to reviews and testimonials it’s also important to remember that there are two groups of customers that are going to be most motivated to respond – customers that are very happy with your products and services and customers that are unhappy with your products and services.

That’s actually a good thing because an upset customer review is an opportunity to make things right and change that interaction for the better. All you need to do is respond and deal with fair criticisms fairly. The sooner you’re able to make that situation right the easier it will be to win that customer back to your business.

Even if you don’t get them back, responsive businesses can attract more customers based on their response to a negative review.

So, maybe don’t publish the negative reviews, but make sure you respond to all publicly available negative reviews and try to turn the interaction into a good one.

Does this sound like a lot of work? That’s fair! There’s a reason there’s a wide selection of web design companies in Sydney. Web designers in Sydney can help businesses throughout Australia make the most of their websites and make sure everything is working in line with your business goals.

If you need a website design company in Sydney that can help you get your business website up off the ground, handle ongoing content creation, and make sure you’re using the right SEO strategies to get your business noticed, you’re in the right place.

At ThreAD, your success is our main priority. We’re a full-service web design provider right here in Sydney, and can handle everything you need from building and operating a successful site to creating an app for your business.

There are a lot of web designers in Sydney, but we’re committed to offering every service a business needs to create a successful and sustainable website. We can also help with creating a content plan, getting your content out there, and offering ongoing SEO to meet your business goals.
Ready to get started with your new web site?

Contact ThreAD and tell us about your project, what you’re looking for, and how we can help your business website dreams become a reality!

Sydney web design is complicated, which means that business owners often have a lot of questions about our services, how they can get their website off the ground, and more.

Here are some of the more frequently asked questions about web design and web design agencies in Sydney: