When it comes to YOUR website, YOUR opinion may not be worth the paper it’s printed on

The art of creating a successful website is an extensive and complicated affair. There is no quick and easy way to achieve success, however, there are many quick and easy ways to make it a complete failure.

In my experience, one of the most common failure strategies is to focus on your own opinion. Especially if you are a business owner you are very used to being the fountain of all relevant knowledge and you justify this by being the reason the company exists in the first place. However, when it comes to websites, at best, your opinion MAY be relevant, but if it is, it is only by luck.

When the purpose of your website is to attract potential customers, it needs to be found on search engines. In order to be found on search engines, you first need to know what people are searching for. This means you need to know the language that potential customers use or refer to you as, NOT what you think best describes your company.

Your website could be perfectly optimised for the word “Arborist” because it is perfectly describes your service. (FYI, an Arborist is a Tree Surgeon if you didn’t know). Is anyone searching for “Arborist” on Google? Probably not.

So do you think you should optimise your website for “Tree Surgeon” and not “Arborist”?

No! Your opinion doesn't matter!!!

You need to gather all the available information to give some recommendations. Use Google analytics to suggest words, analyse your competitors, ask existing customers. This will then give you suggestions. You then need to develop a website which can feedback information about what words potential customers are actually searching for. It could be “Tree Gardener”, “Lumberjack” or “Oak Chopper”, it doesn’t matter, get the figures and respond to them, THAT is how you get your website to work for you.

So the next time you are trying to decide on which web design company to go with, ask yourself which one is focusing on providing you with a successful website, not looking at which one you think could provide the best design.