Starting a business from the ground up in this day and age is completely different than 20 years ago. Today, consumers are flocking to the internet by the billions to conduct research, compare companies, read reviews, and more. According to Hubspot, 61% of global internet users research products online. Therefore, it is safe to assume if your company is not easily find-able in the major search engines, you may find that new business is tough to generate.

The purpose of this blog post is to share our opinion on how to successfully start a business from the ground up.

Step One: Creating a Modern, Search, User Friendly Website

We have all visited websites that we are not found of. Chances are, if you were researching a company and it was outdated, had no trust symbols, ugly, and did not provide a friendly user experience. It likely turned you off. First impressions are everything for your website visitors. Just like a storefront that is modern, clean, & easy to navigate you want your website to reflect the same.

A Google Analytics metric one could use to determine what the “masses” think about your website would be bounce rate. A first impression can be gauged by this metric. Your bounce rate will reflect how many people do not go further in your website and click “back” or exit out of your website. This metric is extremely important to give you insight as to how your visitors feel about your website.

Important Note: The quality and intention of your users also play a role in bounce rate, the above is meant to give you an example if your visitors are targeted, yet you still see a larger than normal bounce rate.

Furthermore, if your website is outdated and/or you choose a website running on older technology, you may not reap the rewards of search engine recognition. Some older templates, themes, or services (such as Godaddy Website Builder) limits the amount of activities one can do on the website.

It is strongly recommended based on our experience with over 100+ clients, that you choose WordPress as your go to platform.

To save money further, you do not need a custom WordPress website, as this can cost you a few thousand dollars. You can purchase a template from a website like Themeforest.net for around $55.00 and hire a developer to “customize” it for your business. The developer should take no more than 5-10 hours to customize the template, and at $50.00 per hour, your all in cost for a modern, search engine friendly website for around $550.00 (factoring in 10 hours of development time).

If you sort WordPress websites by popularity, you will find websites that have built in user experience features.

By using this method, you will also save money in the long run. Don’t feel intimidated. If you know how to write emails, you can easily change the words on your website! Gone are the days of paying $50.00 per hour for simple text changes to your website. You do not need to know how to code websites to make changes. Over the course of your business, the savings this will generate will be substantial.

Bonus Point: Make sure you pre-plan some amazing offers that your competitors wouldn’t offer. This will help you convert the most amount of traffic from visitor into lead. This is called a call to action, I strongly recommend you change this each month and track the results within Google Analytics. You will see which offers drive the most amount of conversions (phone calls or form submissions) and then you can revert back to the best performing offer.

Step Two: PPC – Pay Per Click Management

Since SEO takes time, you will want to create a PPC campaign. Google Adwords is the major player in the paid advertising market. When PPC is done correctly, you can achieve a return on investment in excess of 400%. Recently, our organization was shortlisted for the Best PPC Campaign in the Country by the US Search Awards 2014 in Associate with Pubcon. The campaign submitted was spending $250k per month with a 400% ROI.

For a even higher ROI, you can partake in Google Shopping if you sell products and/or dynamic remarketing no matter what industry you are in. These subjects are more advanced, so you may need the help of a professional PPC manager.

If you are on a tight budget, Google does offer Adwords Express which will quickly get you shown, however, your ROI will not be as high as not much research/data analysis is involved in this type of campaign.

Bonus Tip: Be very careful about broad match keywords, any variation of your keyword can be used. So if you do pest control on broad match. You will pay for clicks for how to do pest control on your own. This person obviously wants to do it themselves so is not a good visitor. This would be a wasted click which is why many think “it doesn’t work”. Adwords does work if done by a team of professionals.

Step Three: SEO – Search Engine Optimization of the Website

You need SEO. Fort Lauderdale is a pretty competitive city that our company ranks well in. I will be sharing what you need to do when starting your business from the ground up to achieve similar results. First, I strongly recommend you take moment to read this article by Google.

Let us use the example of a new pest control company. Lets say you service 5 cities in South Florida. For each city that you wish to do business in, you will want to create a new page on your website with the CITY NAME followed by SERVICE. So in this example, you would name that sub-page: websitehere(.)com/fort-lauderdale-pest-control-company. You would then write around 500 words about your pest control service in that area. Show why you are different and be sure to include some variations of your main keyword. Maybe termite pest control company is another service you offer.

Start writing some content that will be used on other websites. One example is livejournal.com. You can create a post there. Should be 500 words or more about your services, results, before and after pictures, common questions that you hear, etc. Be sure at the end to leave a link to your website with either your company name, your website, or generic words such as click here, learn more, etc.

Unfortunately, if you are opening a business in a super competitive industry (real estate, insurance, etc) you may need the services of a company like ours to assist you in ranking Page One for your target keywords. If you are starting a business from the ground up in a competitive industry, take a moment to check our results and our accomplishments.