Sydney Business Websites are only part of a complete business solution

You read that correctly - smart businesses don't just buy  Sydney Business Websites! Why? Because they buy growth and sustainability and customer loyalty that will facilitate measured growth and business performance with a three year horizon.  Also because they buy a business edge that will give them a sharper edge than their competitors' and  they buy solutions that will keep their customers in touch with their latest offering, discuss their problems and generate real customer loyalty.

Is a Sydney Business Website an important part of this? Of course it is! But if your business pays for a website with no goals, no objectives built into its design and the support systems around it, then quite frankly you might as well be investing your money on selling scuba diving kit in the Gobi desert. You can have an absolutely beautiful website that's cost you a lot of money and still be invisible to your customers. 

The Basics of Online Presence for Local Business in Sydney

Before we talk about the performance of our website, Facebook page and so on, we need to examine what basic presence a local business needs and why it needs the various components.

Key Components of a Business' online presence

For every Sydney business, these are the potential key elements:

Choosing which of these elements you need requires some insight into the modern media landscape, but you do not need to start them all at once.  

The Cornerstone of Sydney Business Online Presence

Your Sydney Business' online presence begins with a website - but not just any website.  A Sydney  business website must be visible, and to be visible it must be built from the ground up in compliance with Search Engine Guidelines - and especially Google guidelines. A  Business Website built with 'plug and pray' technology is very unlikely to give any return on investment to your business. 

12 Key Design Elements of  Sydney Business Websites

Google has very specific requirements for recognizing and listing a local business. Here are the key points:

Implementing and checking these factors requires expertise that should be applied before building your business website even begins.. 

The Truth about Sydney Business Websites' Speed

When we hear people preaching about website speed, many of, especially if we are patient people, tend to shrug it off and intuit that 'a few seconds' won't make any difference. Nothing could be further from the truth! Here are a few alarming facts for Sydney Business Website owners:

What Google Says about Website Loading Speed

“…faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings.”

Lesson 1: Smart Business Owners buy FAST SYDNEY BUSINESS WEBSITES

The Importance Mobile Friendly Sydney Business Websites

If you want your Sydney Business Website to give you a positive return on your investment, then it MUST be mobile friendly. That's because most of your customers now search on mobiles, not on desktops: In October 2016, mobile traffic officially surpassed desktop traffic on the internet.

Google now gives priority to scanning the mobile version of your business website before it gets to the desktop version. if the mobile version of your Sydney Business Website  does not meet standards of usability, readability and loading speed, the chances are that it will suffer badly in the rankings war with your competitors.

Examples of Business Mobile Websites

Mobile Sydney Business Websites Example 1: Sydney Business Web

When we designed our own website, we knew we wanted:

Mobile Sydney Business Websites Example 2: Electrical Contractor Business Website

Our second example of a mobile business website is that of an Electrical Contractor available for emergency call-out. For this local business website to succeed it needs something different to our website:

Mobile Sydney Business Websites Example 3: Digitizing Service with Online Quote Link

For this business, location and immediate contact number are not the most important points to get across as their offering is an online service. So what they needed is:

All of these sites need to load FAST and get the searcher where he/she is going. We all keep a mental checklist when we're searching for something and the website must match our needs FAST or we simply move on.

If the website is fast, WE WIN!  If the searcher needs an electrician in a hurry, a mobile display like the one we've shown wind every time against competition that's less clear. This true for every type of business website.

Premium Hosting - A Key factor in Website Speed

OK, so your website has been designed for speed, but it's still slow - what's happening? You've made a significant investment in your Sydney Business Website and it's simply not fast enough. Chances are, you've got poor hosting. So what's hosting? Can you do anything about it?

Hosting is simply the computer or server on which your website sits.  And yes - you can do plenty about it.  If your business website is hosted with thousands of others on a  cheap host, then this is often what happens: Almost four seconds before even the first transmission of your website to the person searching - by which time the whole site should be loaded!

Lesson 3 : Smart Business Owners use PREMIUM HOSTING for their Sydney Business Websites.

Does Your Business Need Social Media?

The answer to this question, no matter what your business is, is almost certainly YES. Why? Here are a few pointers - the list is far from exhaustive:

Which Social media does my business need?

Facebook for Local Business

In our experience, every business dealing with the public needs a Facebook page -  no ifs, no buts. As of 2019, Australia has fifteen million active monthly users! With a population of around twenty five million people, this means that sixty percent of us are on Facebook.

Can your business afford to ignore them? Can your business afford being invisible on Facebook?

LinkedIn for Business

LinkedIn works mainly for B2B - business to Business. We have established a presence there (as well as a Facebook page), because that's who we do business with - other businesses. It's a great place to make contacts and network.

Pinterest

Pinterest is small in Australia, with fewer than three hundred thousand users. We don't use it in this business. Don't worry about it!

Instagram

Pinterest is a photo-sharing app with nine million Australian users. In our opinion, it's in the early phases of development for business and we don't use it.

YouTube

Like Facebook, YouTube has fifteen million Australian users monthly. This makes it a powerful marketing and sales platform. However, making good quality, engaging videos is much harder than generating good quality ads, so there is additional expense and complexity before a business is ready for this. If your business is in the early stages of developing its social media presence, we suggest leaving this until later.

Lesson 4 : Smart Business Owners integrate the right Social Media platforms for their business with their website presence to build their brand and optimize profits 

Putting it together for Sydney Local Business

I tried to keep this article as brief as possible but, As Benjamin Franklin once wrote:  "I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter." 

Concluding though, we'll create a whole online strategy for you including a high-performance website and help you make sure that your business gets a solid return on investment. We're not just a tech-company; we have decades of experience in the business world and combine the best practices from big business with the nimbleness and adaptability needed by small business.

Lesson 6 : Smart Business Owners don't buy websites - they buy business systems that make a measurable Return On Investment.

The Critical Nature of SEO for your Sydney Business Website

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and what it means is making sure that:

There are two parts to SEO: Onsite and Offsite. You cannot afford to ignore either of these.

Onsite SEO

Onsite SEO takes place behind the scenes in the structure of your Sydney Business Website. Inside every site, in addition to the words in your articles and images, there are blocks of what we call 'meta data'. This data is in small blocks that tell search engines what your website and articles are all about. In addition to that, every article you write should be based on 'keyword research' which informs your designer where to place the focus when building the site (or article). 

It's no use just stuffing your pages with keywords, because that practice heavily punished and can sink a website in the rankings.  You won't be able to tell by just reading a website if it's properly constructed because to do that you need to look 'under the hood'. But of course, you will easily tell if you're not ranking!

Offsite SEO

This is a bugbear and headache for many business because quite frankly more nonsense has been written and spoken about Offsite SEO than about trump and the Russians. Bad offsite SEO can sink your Sydney Business Website and make salvage difficult and expensive.

In a nutshell, Offsite  SEO means having other good quality, relevant sites linking to your Sydney Business Website. it also means having local citations in quality directories, social media connections and reviews on local sites.