Local Websites; what makes them good and how to tell

Do you use the internet to search for information? And do you search for local products and services online. I thought so. Most people do nowadays. Only a small percentage of people regularly buy online but, as we’ve said before, many people buy offline after searching online.

“Google it”

Most of us use the internet to search for lots of different, often random, things don’t we? I don’t know about you but whenever I have a question, I ‘Google’ it. Isn’t it great how Google have made themselves so indispensable that we have added a new word to the dictionary to describe what they allow us to do!

It is critical because as we’ve just said, people search for information, for solutions, locally as well as globally. In the main, they do not search for YOU or your company. If they knew you existed, they wouldn’t usually be searching online for the products and services that you offer – they would be buying from you already!

Google Loves Fresh Content

There is an added advantage to the idea of creating useful, relevant content for your website visitors…Google loves it! One of the most important things that you can do to keep Google happy and to help to find your site higher up the search engines is to regularly add fresh, relevant content to your website. It’s not just your visitors and potential customers that are looking for useful information on your website, the search engines are too.

And that is where so many small businesses fall down with their web strategy, if you can call it a ‘strategy’. Somewhere along the line the small business owner decided that having a website was a good plan (which it is!) and then most of them will have got a website designer to put together what is known as a ‘brochure’ site.

What’s a ‘brochure site’?

What’s a brochure site you are probably asking? The clue is in the name; a brochure site is one that resembles a printed brochure that you might create about your business. So, a number of pages are put together, designed, and then uploaded to the web. And generally that is how things stay; the content is not updated very often, if at all.

There are two initial problems with that:

1. Many businesses have a “build it and they will come” expectation of their website, which in the main is not the case, except with a particularly well optimised website for a unique business. That’s a bit like getting a load of flyers printed and then leaving them on a desk in an empty shop or office in a high street or business park and expecting to get sales from them; in other words leaving them somewhere without much ‘traffic’ and expecting people to find them, take them and then do something as a result.

2. brochure sites tend not to offer much useful information for visitors as there is a focus on the features of the business’ products and services and the business itself, rather than relevant information that visitors might be looking for to help them to solve a problem.

So, what to do?

Provide fresh content regularly on your site

Amongst other things (that we will cover in future posts) you need to be providing fresh, relevant content on your website and fairly frequently updating your website copy to ensure it remains relevant and effective for your visitors and prospective customers.

The easiest way to do this is to add a blog to your site. Blogs (web logs) started out as web diaries but have now progressed to being a great way of adding fresh content to a website and, in fact, many websites (like ours) are built out of blogging software, that now functions as a very capable content management system.

WordPress for content management

We use software called WordPress that enables us to regularly and easily add fresh, relevant content to our website, and it’s as simple as going into the ‘back end’ of our website, selecting ‘Add Post’, writing the article / blog post, and then clicking ‘Publish’. We also have RSS functionality, which means that you can sign up to receive notification every time we add more content to our site, in a ‘Reader’ or by email.

RSS Feeds,

So, the title of this post is about what makes a local website good and how you can tell. Usually websites that have regular updates to their content have an RSS Feed icon (orange and square) on their site or at least an option like ‘subscribe’ and those sites will tend to be more successful for the above reasons.

If your website is static, i.e. it rarely changes, and is of the ‘brochure variety’ then you really should be thinking about offering your visitors and potential customers something more. If that concept worries you – we often have people saying ‘what can I write about on a regular basis?’ – then it shouldn’t. Do you know a fair amount about your niche / business / product and how people can use it? Do you understand the ‘pain’ that your customers have? Do you know what your customers should do to relieve that ‘pain’? Well, then you are in a great position to create short, 300 word, articles to help those people. You can do ‘how to’ articles, top 10 lists, your opinion on industry developments, links to, and comments on, useful online resources etc. If you are starting from the position of a brochure site that hasn’t changed in years, even a new page / blog post / article every few weeks is better than nothing. More often would be better, but we all have to start somewhere and the beauty of the internet is that small incremental changes quite quickly build into a more profound advantage.

Originally published in Kent on Saturday on Saturday 4 July

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Tagged as: Blog, Business, Google, small business, Web design, Web search engine, Website, WordPress