Creating a great business website that is easily found by potential customers can often be a daunting task. But, it is necessary, in order to build trust, engage customers, demonstrate your service or highlight your product, and sell your good.

Taking lessons from Louis Brightman’s GoDaddy website masterclass, Small Business outlines how to create a great business website and ensure that it’s found.

1. Choosing the right website for your business

There are many types of business; some will just require business cards and others will need a full e-commerce function.

But, regardless of what type of website you need, the same building blocks are needed to build a website:

The domain name – this is similar to the number of your house. See our article: Getting and setting up a business domain name

Hosting – a website is built with pictures and text, and the hosting is bricks and mortar and electricity of your house. It keeps the website live.

Content – what type of website does your business need and what type of content is housed on your website? Whether it’s a brochure type, hospitality sector, small scale e-commerce or large scale e-commerce website, any can be hosted on GoDaddy.

Questions to ask yourself and considerations:

• Are you looking for something custom-made or a website pre-built?
• Do you want something you can call your business card?
• Are you selling services or products?
• Do I need to go straight to e-commerce if I plan on selling in the future?

GoDaddy’s plan always come in 3’s; standard, premium (for taking bookings for services) and e-commerce for the full-store features.

2. Building great website content and great pages

1. Home page – keep the homepage visually impactful, short, to the point and think about what you want your customers to see and do after finding you.

Website home pages also need a strong call to action. The call to action gives customers a chance to turn the page of your website and find out more.

Important question to ask: What is the single most important thing you want your visitors to do before they leave your homepage? It’s more complex than buy something; sign up to newsletter, make an appointment or watch a video, for example.

2. About us – express yourself. The About us page is where you can write about your motives and vision for your business. How did you get into the business and why? What stands you apart?

It’s your chance to tell your customers more about why they should trust you with their custom. And it’s a chance to introduce your team, engage customers and inspire their trust.

3. Our service – describe services in full and make it clear as to what you offer: price lists, shipping costs, returns policies, warranties and FAQs should be displayed here.

4. Blog feature – this is most underrated way to get people to find your website and to impress customers. In the Blog section, you can publish news articles about your company, upcoming events, and it’s also a way to tell stories and engage with customers.

After a year of doing this, you will do your SEO a lot of favours and new customers will get to look back on previous posts, which will boost your business credibility.

Also, anyone who links to your website as a result of the content you create will produce a backlink. The more backlinks you have, the more credibility Google will assign to you, and the more organic traffic you will have, driving more engagement and boosting SEO.

In addition, video content is hugely important.

3. Getting found online

One of the biggest challenges is improving your SEO, or search engine optimisation.

If you’re trying to attract customers through the door of a business (a bar or coffee shop, for example), or you run a business that serves a specific local area (such as a plumber), then you need to think about SEO.

A number of factors impact getting found online, but Google ranking is the most important factor. It can be boosted by:

Social media activity – regular posting, sharing and reaching out to people to drive engagement.

Everything in line with the website – ensure optimisation through technology. GoDaddy’s SEO tool can connect all social channels easily.

Connect with GoDaddy’s partners – Over allows you to post image templates for social media posts, which will look more professional.

Get recognised – set up Google Business profile.

Digital marketing – spend money on advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Google – pay per click).

See also: Five effective digital marketing tips for a small business

How GoDaddy can help

Getting to know GoDaddy websites + marketing

GoDaddy’s W+M hosts, secures, and builds your website all-in-one.

In the last 12 months, GoDaddy has taken huge strides forward in the marketing element of this with an intuitive dashboard that connects to Google and improves Google ranking, and a professional post-creator for social media.

The building aspect of the website is easy; it can take less than an hour to put your website online and ensure it looks professional using GoDaddy’s themes, fonts and templates to structure your own branded website.

Websites are also automatically mobile optimised and social media accounts are all manageable from one place.

The website has a data collector, letting users know how many views your site has had, who found you via social media and information on how to take action on these pieces of information. For example, in a scenario where 15 people came into your website last week and added items to their cart, but for whatever reason did not made the purchase, the data collector will recommend to send a bespoke email to those individuals in order to engage them.

Selling products online

In the past if you wanted to sell products online, you’d have to spend a lot on a custom-made e-commerce website, which would likely cost thousands of pounds.

With Online Store from GoDaddy you can build a fully fledged e-commerce site just as easily as any other website builder.

You can include up to 5,000 products, so it’s perfect for everything but the largest e-commerce sites.

WordPress and Websites + Marketing

Using GoDaddy’s Website Builder is not the only option, GoDaddy are partners with WordPress – 40% of websites are built with this plan: WordPress and Websites + Marketing.

WordPress works like your iPhone – it can be customised using lots of different things based on the apps downloaded. This is how WordPress works. Web Builder is everything all in one, but GoDaddy in partnership with WordPress can build websites from the ground up for a more unique feel.