All About Websites
SEO Meets Content

For the most minimum viable website, you'll need a laptop or computer, wi-fi connection, and email address. That's it. Then you can get a free website (a subdomain) from a large website provider like Google Sites, Notion, Canva, or Wix. They can all provide a most basic website without much work beyond using a template and editing a few text and images. You can even use sites like Gumroad, Etsy, or Substack as your default webpage, if your goals are to sell online or create written content.

For a more traditional website, you'll need to choose a website designer with more extensive capabilities like multi-page sitemap, content management, library of templates, integrations, and/or other functionality that's appropriate for your business such as online checkout for e-commerce stores or menu for restaurants.

For a website with its own domain name, you'll need all of the above and a custom domain name that you own. Custom domain names can be bought from sites like Squarespace or GoDaddy. Those domain names can then be added to any of the website builders you've chosen to host your site.

We are not professionally trained at building websites, but have been involved in creating websites for businesses and have toiled away on our own website over the year. If you leverage a firm focused on website design, they will have a process for you to work through. If you're looking to do-it-yourself, then here's what we've done.

Website Goals & Objective: The process of creating a website starts offline and instead focuses on answering more elusive questions that you may not have considered:
1 - What is the business objective of having a website?
2 - What is the story you hope to tell with your website? 
3 - What call-to-action do you ask of users who visit your website?

Messaging & Copy: During the process of figuring out the purpose and goal of a website, you will likely spend time determining your company vision and mission for more aspirational brands or ironing out your value proposition and product offering for most other brands. Based on this, you will need to understand what your messaging and copy is for your website. Striking a uniform and on brand tone is important, and where a copywriter can help.

Inspiration & Wireframe: Find inspiration from other websites and develop a wireframe. The most efficient options for wireframes are tools like Miro, Figma, FigJam, or plain pencil and paper.

Choose a Template & Tinker Away: Then we go into the website builder and choose a suitable pre-existing website. This allows regular people without design experience to leverage the work shared by other designers to easily create a website. Choose a website builder that best suits your business needs and most of it can be spun up without professional help.

Hire Help: Yet if all of this feels overwhelming, as it often can be, then it's time to hire some help whether it's a more out of the box software or a freelancer website designer, there are options abound to choose from.

Not necessarily. It depends on what you seek to achieve and your own comfort level with figuring out how to do things. If a website is a nice to have and you're on a tight budget, skip the website, and leverage a free solution instead.

If you're stilly not sure, start with a free website and a subdomain. Then when you're more sure with your goals, then modify accordingly.

Websites that have perfect SEO don't always rank. Websites with poor SEO and excellent content can rank very well. Websites with both great content and a well implemented SEO will likely win. Therefore the order of prioritization is the content made for users and then make edits to existing content, slight adjustments, to optimize the website for search engines.

SEO is a complicated topic that even Enterprise companies will hire SEO consultants to help. The engine changes from time to time and so does the competitive landscape. This is enough to make it a field that most companies will rely on external help to level up their game.

Refer to our Site Audits Service to see the options of evaluating your website's quality for SEO.

If you're not getting traffic, then it's worth evaluating whether or not what you're offering is actually valuable to your target audience.
1 - Reach out to people who you believe to be your target demographic and talk to them. Ask them questions and get feedback.
2 - Consider the competitive landscape. Even if you're great, if the market is competitive then it's hard to beat the competition and stand out. If you're great, but the market is tiny, then there wasn't anyone to sell to in the first place.

Site traffic isn't just about your website, it's about business' ability to sell to clients. Consider unpacking your strategy holistically through customer research, feedback, and any data you can gather. Consider reading the Lean Startup where a startup founder similarly explains how their painstaking efforts to create a software product didn't get much success, and how they changed how they worked to improve.

Fresh content does help a website signal to search engines that this website is being maintained and updated. An estimated 80%+ of websites are inactive. Therefore, continued content creation will help the website, despite not guaranteeing success.

However, that doesn't mean creating a breakneck amount of content. There are other ways to keep a website up to date without significant content creation such as with advertising, social media, and refresh of existing content.

Refer to our Site Audits Service to see the options of evaluating your website's quality for SEO. You can do these audits yourself or hire someone to help you.