Who is your target audience? How will your target audience find you? How do you convert your audience into sales? You should ask yourself three questions when putting your first small business website together.

When planning your first small business website, you should ask yourself three important questions:

Who is your target audience?
How will your target audience find you?
How do you convert your audience into sales?

While these questions seem obvious, it’s amazing how many people don’t bother … and then the show that “our website doesn’t do us any business”.

Who is your target audience?

Think hard about your target market. Who do you want to attract to your website? Why? The answer is probably the possibility of selling some of them – a product, a service, or perhaps an idea.

The claims of anyone and everyone in your market are very vague and your website will lack focus and will most likely fail to do so. Ideally, you should aim to create a niche.

 2) How will they find you?

Creating a niche will help you in search engines and drive hot leads to your site.

Consider what keywords you can type to search for in your target market. Do the actual searches yourself. Who comes in the top 30? Because you need to be there. Are your competitors out there? Visit their sites. Do they work? How can you improve them? Identify something unique about your business that sets it apart from the rest.

These keywords – or keyphrase may be more accurate – need to be included in the pages of your site – in page titles, headlines, and internal links. Be specific with your keypresses. These will be less competitive than simple single word searches and will target your market more accurately.

You may need to localize or specialize in the top 30 – and the top 30 where you need to drive traffic to your site. As I’m sure you’re aware of your own experience, if you can’t find what you’re looking for in the first 3 results pages, you can look elsewhere.

The key to achieving high search engine rankings is creating internal links to your web pages – these are the pages of external websites that link to the pages of your site. Seriously this link acquisition should be a natural increase – where the number of inbound links gradually increases in speed.

Pages linked to you should be relevant, on-topic, and ideally have the same keywords – especially in the attached text. Search engines rank pages based on their reputation – your ranking will determine what other (possibly higher ranking) pages say about your page.

3) How do you convert your audience into sales?

Don’t just tell them what you do or sell. Say why they want it (yes, they want it – they don’t need it). Provide incentives, freebies, discounts – something to start this dialogue.

Current research indicates that the human brain makes judgments about a web page in twenty seconds! It won’t leave you too long to make an impression. So, make sure that your own unique sales point (USP) is clearly visible on your home page – and preferably prominent on each of your other pages. Finds out.

Then make sure you list your bullet-point guarantee. Viewers need to understand why you are different from the rest and why they should treat you, not your competitors. And as we have discovered, they must understand it immediately.

Lastly, make sure your site has a funnel-like structure. Identify your important pages – usually “call to action” or purchase a page – and make sure all leads to those pages lead your internal links – such as their external equivalents – to the target page.

If you sell blue widgets, don’t call your product pages “products,” say “blue widgets,” and make sure the links on this page also say “blue widgets.” Not only will this help search engines identify and rank the most important pages on your site, but it will also lead your visitors to those important conversions.