I’m online already. Isn’t that enough?
In 2020, online shopping skyrocketed. In the first half of the year, new Irish websites increased by a huge 26%. The other change was that Mobile use jumped by 70% to over 3 billion users worldwide. This is the first year that the majority of traffic happened on our phones.
As a result of these two changes, the online landscape has become more crowded and online behaviour has changed. The best way to respond to these changes is by standing out.
How to make your website stand out
For most small businesses, your website is your primary online channel. This is how new customers usually find you. Searching online sends 67% of global traffic to websites. It is vital that you get a piece of that action. Half of that traffic is made up of Google ads. Ads work by showing your website to customers looking for exactly what you provide. If you have customers that know exactly what they want, search will work for you. The main way you can stand out here is with a larger budget.
Organic traffic is where small businesses do well. With millions of results, search engines compete to show searchers the most relevant, useful and trustworthy match they can find. You could be the best business in town but if Google does not trust you, your competitors will get the traffic.
Luckily most websites are built with Google-friendly signals these days. Web design standards are high. If a design cuts corners it is easy to spot. Once you go live, however, you need to carve out your advantage. There are plenty of companies out there who will swear they can bump you up to the top of Google. They can but the only way to do this is if you pay. Once your money runs out, your website will sink without trace.
Natural competition, User Behaviour and changes to Search Engines algorithms are what drive the changes now. Making sure your website responds to these factors is a natural process. The only way to do it is by making consistent small changes. Small businesses can do this much quicker than larger businesses.
Bonus Tip – Meta descriptions are used by Google to show a snippet of your page to searchers in the results. A lot of businesses don’t bother with them as Google will fill them in automatically. However, this a missed opportunity as you can craft them to sound better than your competitors.
How to make your Products/Services stand out
Products and Services are what your customer is looking for. It is vital that the right information is here. Websites have a tendency to throw lots of information at the customer in the hope that something sticks. Nobody has time for that. Nothing will make a customer leave your page quicker than having to slog through unnecessary information. Except perhaps a hard sell. If your product or service is good enough, it just needs to be put in front of the person who wants it. I always get a smell of desperation off a hard sell and it makes me hate marketing.
So what should be here? Customers want to quickly scan the important features and instantly understand how their lives will improve. Descriptions should solve problems, remove obstacles and mirror motivations. Descriptions should RARELY try to persuade or convince. Nor does every feature needs to be included. Once you know exactly who your customer is you will know what to include.
Bonus Tip – Ecommerce website owners often ask me if Google will penalise them if they use duplicate content. This often happens when they want to copy the original description. After all, they argue, the supplier has already created it so why go to the extra trouble and also, every other website is also copying it. Google probably will not penalise them but a customer faced with multiple websites showing the same description of a bed will not be helped. A unique description will attract the customer and Google will follow the customer.
How to stand out on different channels
Social
Social accounted for 8% of traffic globally in 2020. It is a huge time sink and very few businesses do it well. The logic seems to be everyone else is on it so we should be too. That is not a great starting point and businesses quickly end up getting overwhelmed by the many shiny distractions of each platform. What tends to happen is everyone copies each other and it becomes a pointless race towards blandness. The point of Social is to be different and yourself, not try and sound like the next Innocent or be Red Bull.
Social works well if you have something that people do not know they want until they see it. Social content attracts peoples attention in a casual way. The return for your business happens when people interact and the platform shows your business to more people. This is organic traffic. If there is no interaction, only a tiny percentage of your customers will see you. Personally, I like Social as a consumer and because I think it is a fascinating experiment in online behaviour. As a business. I don’t trust it.
This is because the game is rigged. The alternative on Social is paying to advertise. This is how platforms make their money and you do not have to be a business genius to know what they want you to do. Every business will decide how it will combine interaction and advertising depending on their resources and budget.
Obviously, a business that stands out will reach more customers, organically and through advertisements. Each business must decide what sort of relationship it wants with its customers. If that foundation is built, it is easier to avoid the many distractions that Social is known for.
Blogs
Blogs work in two ways, to educate your customers and to signal to search engines. This is an opportunity to showcase your expertise. The blogs that stand out are useful for customers. If they bookmark your blog, or subscribe to it or share your posts, you are doing something right and your customers will spread the word about you.
The other side of blogs is SEO. For a search engine, blogs are fresh content. The internet is built on information and the latest information is considered more important than older information. The only thing that search engines find juicier than that is information with lots of interaction and backlinks. In other words, blogs. If your blog is good enough to build in these two areas, Google will show your website to more people.
Email is one of the top-performing channels as is one of the few channels where your followers are real. Customers agree to hand over their email address so you can start a relationship with them. The internet has changed in a lot of ways but people hang onto their email addresses. Most use this as an attempt to sell more. That’s just annoying. I don’t know many who like receiving irrelevant emails in their inbox. It is quite easy to stand out on this channel – treat your email subscribers as special in some way.
I hope that this blog has convinced you to have a look at how your business can stand out online. The digital landscape is always changing and each platform has multiple ways to help your business stand out. If you would like to talk more about how I can identify how to do this for your business, give me a call on 087 752 9545.