We’re still hereHow to create a page on your website so people know you’re still open

www.archanthub.co.uk

The world has become a very strange place...

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With this in mind your approach to marketing, selling and serving your customers needs to shift from ‘How can I sell?’ to ‘How can I help?’

Your customers are likely to have problems that you can help with and maybe even issues that you can solve for them completely.

So you need to figure out what you can do. Do any of the products or services you offer help right now? How can you be relevant in the current situation we all find ourselves in?

Let’s start by agreeing that your customers are finding this lockdown just as hard as you. They are facing issues getting things they need and they are also worried that things are likely to be even more serious in a few weeks time.

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You know your customers better than anyone. Use that knowledge to help them and put your business at the front of their mind.Goodwill goes a long way, businesses who can genuinely help their customer base not only get front of mind but possibly even a place in their heart. If front of mind is marketing gold, a positive place in your customers emotions is an even more valuable place to be, and that is how brands are built.

Right now people are looking for help online. Here are some Google trends from the last few weeks:

Relevance is Key

You can see from these examples that ‘shopping’, ‘delivery’ and ‘near me’ are at the forefront of people’s minds. Customers are clearly localising, and prioritising.

Currently there are breakout volumes of searches for things like chest freezers delivery, bread machines, school supplies and for the green fingered among us people are planting vegetables.

The point here is not that business is carrying on as normal, because clearly this isn’t normal for anyone, but that there are still people who want and need the things that shops sell. They just want them nearby or delivered to their door.

Think about your business. What do you sell that people might need you to either deliver or provide without them leaving the house. Is it realistic for you to deliver it? Or if you can’t, could you team up with a local business? Maybe a taxi company with no people to transport might deliver gardening or pets supplies to those who can’t get out of the house but still need to feed the cat.

So when you have worked out the message you want to go with - you need to get that message out where people are looking.

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Create a new page on your website

It isn’t always easy to change the site navigation, so you may need your web developer to help with this, but it is important. Adding a page to your main site navigation sends a strong message of its importance to the search engine and also makes it super easy for a user to find.

Adding the word ‘delivery’ to a query actually changes the search results quite a lot. You now might not show up where you did before, because people are searching for things in a different way.

In this case, you need a quick and fairly simple bit of SEO (search engine optimisation) to help you out. Don’t worry about the acronym, what we’re suggesting here just involves building a page on your website that a search engine like Google can find and show in the results when people search.

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First of all, you need this page to be visible to both search engines and website visitors - so the page needs to be in your main site navigation. This is unusual as typically a new page would fit into your existing site page structure, but in this situation you are likely to need this page to stand out and be front and centre of your website for the next 12 weeks or so.

NEW PAGETESTIMONIALSHOME ABOUT US

Add a page to your Site Navigation

Make sure the design is the same as your regular pages - you don’t want to put users off by using an

unfamiliar style and layout.

Make sure the ‘SEO settings’ such as page title, page headings and meta description are unique, in

the format search engines like and aimed at your potential customers (You can adjust SEO settings on a page by page basis in most website back-ends)

So what title do you give your page and what queries/keywords do you target?

Regular research into keywords isn’t that useful for this, most of the tools that show you the queries/keywords people have been using just aren’t up to date enough with the current situation. Google’s own keyword planner is around a month behind trends, and because Covid-19 is new there just isn’t a lot of historical search data.

That means we need to use common sense, your customers and Google trends as a guide. If you want people to know that your restaurant now does deliveries then your page information needs to say that.

Building a Webpage

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Building the page is fairly straightforward if you are familiar with building pages in your website content management space or back-end, and sites built with Wordpress, Duda or Wix are super simple.

Here’s an example of how your SEO settings should look if you were ‘Big Fishy Bobs Chip Shop in Cromer’:

Page Title - Fish and Chips Delivery Service | Big Fishy Bobs Cromer

H1 Heading - Fish and Chips delivered to your door

Meta Description - We can deliver the Fish and Chips you love to your door, if you are stuck at home, give us a call and we will bring your food to you.

In this example the Page title is in the format that search engines want:

Primary Keyword (Fish and Chips) Secondary Keyword (Delivery Service) | Brand (Big Fishy Bobs Cromer)

Also, the page title is under 70 characters long which means it should be able to show all of the title in mobile results.

The H1 Heading shows on the page (unlike the title) and it clearly tells the user what the page is about.

The Meta Description is aimed at the user and clearly tells them what they need to know before they click.

The Page Title and Meta Description are what appears on the search results page - so these are really important for informing the user that this is the result they want and (this is the most important bit) getting them to click and visit your site.

Our example would look like this in the Google search results:

As a user you recognise the brand, you see they offer a delivery service and reading the meta description (the text under the blue link) tells you they will bring it to your home…nice and clickable.

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What the customer needs to see post click

The best piece of advice here is to be really clear and make sure that the page is fully focused on your message.

The page heading should reflect the link that the user clicked and immediately tell them that they are in the right place. Clearly describe the solution that you have and what you can do to help your customers - your first paragraph needs to be more “we are ready to help and can deliver/do the thing you need” and less “these are the reasons we are great.”

Include an FAQ on this page, as people will have questions, expecially at a time like this. Think about the kind of questions that your customers will have that are specific to your business, not anyone else’s, and answer those.

You can make your FAQ more search engine friendly by adding schema markup. Don’t worry if that sounds like nonsense to you, a good website developer can help you with this. It simply puts your questions and answers in a format that is really easy for search engines to find and show.

You need your ‘Coronavirus page’ to be as accessible and useful as possible, the page needs to be the definitive answer to “can I still get this product/service here?’

Your page should also have a really clear ‘action’ that you want the user to take. If you have e-commerce you can direct them to your product pages, if you want people to phone in and order then make sure that is really clear and easy to do.

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Post Click Advice

This might mean adding large click to call buttons in the main page rather than just relying on the click to calls that are in the header or the footer. Remember these customers might not be internet savvy, so don’t expect them to know specific things about your website such as your phone number always sitting at the top of the page.

The whole point of this dedicated page should be to answer your customers questions but also to get them to contact you and buy from you as simply and easily as possible. Keep that in mind and you won’t go far wrong.

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Getting people to your page

Once the page is built you need people and the search engines to find it.

The first way to do this, is by adding the page to your site map and then submitting it to Google. This isn’t usual practice for pages added to an existing site, but this will now be a key page and you want Google to index it as such.

You can update and submit your own sitemap in platforms like Wordpress, Duda or Wix very easily. There is a button under SEO settings that effectively does this for you, but if you are unsure speak to your Archant Account Manager.

They can help or will know someone who can. Alternatively a good web developer can do this for you, it is such a standard procedure that most web developers will do this automatically when they add a new main site page.

Once the page is on Google you can get traffic there using listing features such as Google My Business products, social media posts and adverts. You can also continue to use your normal advertising channels. Just make sure that the message that you are still open but just in a different way is as clear as possible.

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Increase your Web Traffic

Our account managers are able to help in times like this with practical advice, and if they can’t solve a problem for you they will be just a call away from our full business resources. This is not a normal time for any business and we have a good resource of digital experts, developers and social media specialists, so please do make use of them.

Archant exists because of the communities it serves. Local businesses really are the lifeblood of our business. We are offering help to existing and new customers because we know our success is built on yours.

Get in touch and if we can help, we will.

Final Thoughts

Work out how your business is relevant to your customers at this time. How can you solve people’s problems?

Create a dedicated page in your main site navigation

Make sure the ‘SEO settings’ on the new page are unique, in the format search engines like and aimed at your potential customers

Ensure that the content on the new page is as clear as possible and contains an action for customers to complete

Add the page to your sitemap and use listing features to get traffic to visit it

We’re here to help

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For more information or advice, visit www.archanthub.co.uk

or contact your Archant Account Manager