Your Guide To Building A Website For Starting A Business
Having a website can make it easier for you to engage your target audience and help you achieve your business goals faster. Contrary to what many people think, you don’t necessarily need to hire developers to get a business website. This guide includes everything you need to know about building a website for starting a business – keep reading to find out more!
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Before building your website for starting a business, you need to fully understand the people in your target audience. Knowing about the “wants” and “needs” of your potential customers will help you strengthen your position in the industry and help you make sales faster.
Developing a strategy for studying your target audience is not a difficult task. You can find several templates online that can help you analyze your audience in no time. Besides that, you can also follow these helpful target audience analysis tips to streamline the process.
You can also examine the audience analysis models of your competitors to find how you can better analyze your audience. The data you gather from audience analysis will help you develop a website that your prospects like.
2. Study Your Competitors
Before building your website for starting a business, you should also spend time exploring the strategies of your competitors. Doing so will help you understand what to focus on and what to avoid to achieve faster business results.
SWOT framework is a famous competitive analysis strategy you can use to identify your position in the market. You can rely on it to find the areas where you can shine brighter than other business owners.
Source: bdc.ca
SWOT analysis and other such competitive analysis strategies will help you gather data that allows you to build a better website than your competitors.
3. Start With a Plan
Once you gather information about your audience and competitors, you must develop a website development plan. Doing so will ensure you don’t waste time on unnecessary tasks and get straight to essential ones.
For example, when developing your website for starting a business, you might need to spend a lot of time producing videos for your website. Writing down in your business plan that you don’t need to focus on video production will help you focus on other important tasks.
Here are some crucial points most website development plans include:
- Audience information
- Statement of Purpose
- Statement of objective
- Website specifications
- Website presentation
4. Pick the Right Domain and Hosting
Choosing the right domain name is necessary to better present your business. You should pick a domain name that resonates with your target audience. Besides, if you are focused on bringing creativity, you can twist your business’s name and use a new name for your website domain.
Once you buy your domain, you will need to link your website with a reliable hosting service. Choosing the right hosting service won’t be easy if you don’t know about hosting services in the market. Examine all the hosting services so you can pick the one that suits you most.
You can also consider asking for guidance from your friends and family so you can pick the right hosting service faster.
5. Rely on Templates
As mentioned above, you don’t necessarily need to hire a skilled team of website developers or need to learn website development yourself. The website development process can get easier if you rely on a website builder like MotoCMS.
The good thing about MotoCMS is that it can streamline the whole process of website development and doesn’t require you to write a single line of code. Working with MotoCMS will save you time and develop a professional website that builds a positive image of your brand.
You can visit the “PRODUCTS” section of the MotoCMS website and click “Website Templates” to pick the template you like most.
Once in the Templates section, you can click on the “Business & Corporate Multipage” button to explore website templates that are fit for business. You can pick any of the free templates if you are on a tight budget.
Using a template to build your website for starting a business will allow you to save a lot of money and also boost your technical expertise.
6. Don’t Forget About Your Branding Goals
When developing a website for starting a business, the most important thing you need to keep in mind is aligning your website with your branding goals. Doing so will ensure you have a strong online presence and set yourself apart from your competitors.
You need to lay down your branding plan to use copy and visuals on your website that align with your business ethics. With your branding plan, you will find getting desired input from your graphic designer and copywriter easier.
7. Add Proper Subscription Boxes
When developing your website for starting a business, you need to think about how you can add people to your mailing list. A sizable mailing list will allow you to attract quality leads and ensure you can achieve your business goals faster.
MotoCMS website builder can help you add proper lead magnets to your website. You can customize lead magnet boxes so you can convince your website visitors to subscribe to your mailing list.
Keep in mind that good visuals alone will not help you get more email subscribers. Write amazing website copy and powerful CTAs that allow you to win more leads and sales.
8. Add a Translation Button
An important thing to keep in mind when developing a website for starting a business is engaging your audience from across the globe. The simplest way you can engage people from different backgrounds is by adding a Translate button to your website.
You can consider hiring multilingual copywriters who can produce versions of your website copy in different languages.
9. Don’t Forget About Security
Not focusing on cybersecurity when building your website to start a business will be a big mistake. If you don’t want hackers to get their hands on your important data, you need to follow all the important cybersecurity practices.
Avoid using any “copied” code when developing your website if you are not sure about the origins of the code. Rely on MotoCMS templates so you don’t have to worry about cyber threats. Besides that, you can also explore cybersecurity practices to avoid hacking attempts in the long run.
10. Optimize For SEO
Building a website won’t help you win more sales if you don’t get discovered by your target audience. Inbound marketing strategies like SEO can allow you to become a trusted name in your industry and achieve your business goals faster.
SEO, an abbreviation for “Search Engine Optimization,” will help your website climb to the top of SERP rankings. Here are the foundational SEO strategies that can bring quick results and allow you to strengthen the presence of your business.
Right Keywords
When developing your website for starting a business, you must include the right keywords in your website copy. Doing so will ensure that your website can be discovered by your prospects against specific keywords. 
You don’t necessarily need to hire an SEO expert to find the right keywords. A free/paid SEO tool can help you find important keywords in your target industry easily.
Quality Backlinks
You will need quality when building your website for starting a business to ensure you can climb SERP rankings in no time. Building backlinks is tedious, but it can get easier if you follow proven strategies. For example, you can implement the Event Link Building strategy to get quality backlinks.
You can consider hiring a team of link building experts who can vet quality backlinks for your website in no time.
Authoritative Content
Content creation is important to keep in mind when developing your website for starting a business. Good content can help you rank against important keywords in your target audience and also allow you to build your brand.
Writing content can get easier if you explore content marketing resources. Learning from content marketing experts will help you learn the best practices of content creation for your website and other digital channels in no time.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can help you satisfy the technical requirements implemented by search engines. Following the right technical SEO practices will increase your chances of ranking higher on search engine rankings.
Mobile Friendliness
Optimizing your website for mobile users will help you rank higher on SEPRs and ensure that your target audience can visit your website easily. It will be super difficult to make your website mobile-friendly if you write website code from scratch.
However, if you want your website to be mobile-friendly but don’t have time for optimizations, you can rely on MotoCMS templates. Templates present in the MotoCMS library are optimized for smartphones and can help you develop websites that rank higher on SEPRs within a short span of time.
11. Provide Your Privacy Policy
When developing your website for starting a business, you need to ensure that you build a transparent relationship with your prospects. A simple way you can achieve this goal is by defining your Privacy Policy for your website.
A Privacy Policy outlines these processes:
- Collection of Data
- Storage of Data
- Processing of Data
Writing down how you will handle these processes as a business will ensure that you don’t lose the trust of your audience or run into legal problems in the long run. Although you can find Privacy Policy templates online, it’s better to write your Privacy Policy from scratch.
Doing so will help you go through the essential privacy guidelines implemented by government institutions.
12. Promote Your Website
When developing your website for starting a business, you have to figure out how you are going to promote your website to get quick results. Keep in mind that SEO strategies can take anywhere between four weeks and twelve months to help your website rank higher on SERPs.
You need to find strategies that can help you bring more visitors to your website. PPC advertising is an effective strategy that can help you claim top positions against desired keywords and also help you with promoting your website.
Getting started with PPC on search engines like Google or Bing is effortless and doesn’t require you to hire a professional. You can learn about PPC at your pace and learn how to get good results from it in the long run.
13. Track the KPIs
Building a website and leaving it be is not going to help you achieve your business goals in the long run. If you want to ensure that your website works as a lead generation machine, you need to track the effectiveness of your strategies and tweak things with time.
For example, you can do copy A/B testing on your website to get better lead generation results. Besides that, you can also rely on tools like Google Analytics (GA4) to ensure that you gather the right data and make learned decisions accordingly.
14. Build Your Social Presence
Having a website and relying on SEO/PPC alone is not going to help you achieve your goals faster. You need to rely on other digital channels like social media so you can promote your website and raise awareness about your business.
Start by creating your business accounts on relevant social media platforms. Besides that, make sure you include a “social sharing” button on your website so users can quickly share anything they like from your website on their social feeds.
You can also try social media advertising if you don’t want to wait for a long time to get positive results from social media.
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