Are you planning to create a new website in Singapore? There are a number of things that you need to do to ensure that your new website delivers the expected results. As the old adage goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Creating a new website in Singapore without a clear plan is equivalent to constructing a house without any blueprint. Things end up in the wrong place and ruin the overall appearance and performance of the site.
Luckily, Singapore has some of the most skilled website designers and developers in the world. They can help you plan your site ahead of time and give you clear directions to prevent backtracking and unnecessary expenses.
Here are nine practical steps for planning out your new website in Singapore.
Set Goals and Purpose
What is the main reason you are creating a new website in Singapore? Is it to increase the visibility of your business online or boost sales? Identifying the website’s purpose and the target audience will help you to make the right decisions from the onset. While there, define your goals and assign a timeline or deadline to each of them. How many people do you expect to visit your website per month? How many do you expect to sign up for your newsletter? What is your sales and revenue projection?
The goals need to be measurable, specific, attainable, and time-sensitive. Advanced tools such as Google Analytics will help you to monitor the performance of your site over time.
Create a Budget
Regardless of whether you are a fledgling new business, medium-sized, or established business in Singapore, you need to create a budget for all expenses that come with owning and managing a business website in the country.
Some of the expenses that you need to include in the budget are:
- Web design costs
- Programming costs
- Web hosting package
Consult professional web developers in Singapore and research the market by shopping around. Compare and contrast the cost of services offered by different service providers to get the best deal and value for money. The price should be directly equivalent to the quality of services to be rendered. Cheap services could later cost you thousands of dollars that would have been spent on another important aspect of your business such as product redesigning and digital marketing.
Be on the safe side by hiring a team of website developers in Singapore based on references, examples of past projects, experience, and insightfulness.
Assign Roles
As a business owner in Singapore who is determined to reap big from the ballooning and lucrative online market, you need to make sure that every loophole that could result in challenges down the road is filled. One guaranteed way of doing that is by assigning specific roles to each member of your team. Inform them what is expected of them and stay abreast of milestones/deadlines as well as new developments.
Some of the people that you need when creating a new website in Singapore include:
- Company stakeholders
- Website developer
- Content editor and writer
- CSS/HTML professional
- Website and graphic designer
Come up with a Content Strategy
What type of content do you need to achieve your goals and ensure the website is ranked highly on search engines? Simply put, content refers to anything and everything that gives website visitors information about your brand, product, and services.
It can include, but is not limited to the following:
- Blog posts
- Documents
- Videos
- Pictures
- Slideshows
- Links to social media pages/feeds
The content strategy will help you to plan how to present content to your visitors. For example, you can decide to publish five blog posts per month and offer a free report to subscribers after every three months. Since content is one of the corner pillars of your website, consider hiring the best content writers in the market to do it for you. Invest in professional pictures and videos to grasp the attention of potential customers and motivate them to make purchases.
Properly Structure the Website
Take the time to decide which pages you will be used to convey the intended message to the target audience and the features that will be on each of them. Most of the business websites in Singapore have a Contract and About page, but it is not necessary for you to include them on your site. Every page on your site should serve a particular purpose. Unnecessary pages will confuse visitors and make navigation difficult.
Create a Mock-Up/Wireframe
A mock-up or wireframe is an outline of your new Singapore website. It is created using Fireworks and Photoshop and you do not have to include too many details in the mock-up. Use placeholder text to fill the pages and do not spend too much time with the details. The goal is to make sure that everyone in your team has an idea of your site by looking at the mock-up.
Alternatively, if you do not have a design program or know how to use one, you can map out everything on paper then send it to your preferred website designer in Singapore to use as a blueprint when designing the site.
Start Designing the Website
In the current competitive Singapore digital marketing industry, you cannot afford to have a poorly designed website. Google also factors in the design when ranking websites. Ideally, a good website design has both aesthetics and usability.
Here are the basic usability concepts that you should keep in mind.
- Ensure that the site navigation is easy to find and understand. Numerous studies show that a majority of users expect the site navigation should be vertical and centre aligned at the top of the page.
- Make use of easy-to-read font and use colour contrast to make the essential pop
- Ensure the design is responsive to seamlessly adapt to different screen sizes
- Keep it lightweight so that it loads fast
- The company tag line and logo should be easily visible on the page
- Colours and styles should be consistent throughout the site
- Content should be concise and clear
- Design the site with the future in mind. Right now, it may only have a few blog articles and pages, but will it still be functional when your business scales up and needs more pages and blog posts?
Carry Out Tests
Once the new website is complete, carry out multiple tests to identify bugs and details that might have been omitted by the Singapore website designer. Confirm that the site is displayed properly in all browsers and mobile web browsers such as Safari and Opera Mini. Ask colleagues to view it on their mobile devices.
Consistent appearance no matter the screen size will be instrumental in the growth of your business. Confirm that all links are working and images are properly optimised. More importantly, all input fields in forms should be working well.
Maintain your Singapore Business Website
A business website in Singapore is an ongoing entity that will continue to represent your brand to millions of Singaporeans. Based on this fact, you need to continuously monitor and maintain the site to be sure that every feature is working as expected. There is analytics software that you can use to know how your site performing with the public.
Have a daily, monthly, and yearly maintenance plan and budget for each maintenance task. Delegate the tasks to members of your team who have the required skills and expertise.
11 Simple SEO Hacks to Crank Up your New Website Ranking
Congratulations, your website is finally up and running. You have taken the first bold step of actualising your dream of having an online business. The next crucial step that you need to take is to work on the website to ensure it’s optimised and ranking well on Google and other search engines.
Here are 11 simple SEO hacks that you can use to get your new website ranked better than other brands in your niche. Remember, 95% of all Google search traffic goes to websites listed on the first search engine results page.
Focus on Long-Tail Keywords
Sure, short-tail keywords will help you get some organic traffic, but you need to target long-tail keywords to get more results. These are keywords with more than five words and are often question-based. Incorporating these keywords in content will make the website more discoverable with the rising use of voice search.
Unlike the short-tail keywords, these keywords have a specific search intent. Therefore, you can use the traffic generated from them to understand your target audience better. For example, you can use them to know which questions they ask about your products and the best way to respond.
Publish Evergreen Content and Revamp Old Posts
Evergreen content is content that will remain fresh and relevant to the target audience for many years. It is packed with valuable tips, hacks, and other information that resonate with the target audience’s needs and expectations.
Such content will help paint a positive image of your brand to potential customers and search engines. The latter will consider your website an authority in the industry and reward it with a high ranking. Customers will also trust your services more based on the quality of content you provide.
Unfortunately, it also means that you won’t publish articles on current trends, market news, and briefs as you used to before. However, you can still create such content to increase organic traffic and visibility on SERPs for news-related keywords.
More importantly, old posts whose content is no longer relevant to the audience or inaccurate should be updated. Doing so will improve on-site SEO and ensure that you don’t lose any SEO juice to the competitors. You will also save time that would have been spent rewriting the whole article or create brand new articles.
Pay Attention to User Search Intent
One of the worst mistakes you can make after creating a new website is only optimising content for search engines. Sure, writing content for Google bots may result in a high ranking, but do the website visitors convert? Do they buy your product or services after landing on your service pages?
If not, then the chances are that the content does not match the target audience’s search intent. Carry out extensive research to know exactly what the users are looking for when using specific keywords to look up information.
One way of doing this is by looking at the content on the top-ranked blog posts and replicating it. Please don’t get it twisted; by replicating, we don’t mean you copy-paste the content. Instead, you should research the topic and develop a better article to replace the top articles in the SERPs.
Make Sure Images are Optimised
One of the leading causes of slow page load time is heavy images that are not optimised. Customers ready to buy from you won’t hesitate to close the window and visit your competitor’s website if yours takes more than 5 seconds to load fully.
Based on this fact, it is highly recommendable to optimise the images to ensure you never keep the web visitors waiting for them to load. Google bots monitor site bounce rate to determine its suitability to the users. A high bounce rate signifies that the site is irrelevant to the users or offers a poor user experience.
Apart from working on the size of the image files, you also need to include alt tags in all the images. Simply put, an alt tag is a short text that describes the image. Be sure to include a keyword in there for SEO purposes. If the site takes a long to load, the alt text will be displayed to the users. This form of text also helps users who rely on screen-readers to browse your website better.
Establish a Backlink Profile
Backlinks help Google know that a particular website is an authority and deserves to be ranked first. As a new website owner, getting other sites to link back to you is challenging, bearing in mind that you don’t have much traffic and visibility online.
However, you can earn backlinks from websites with high domain authority and relevant to your niche through guest posting. Reports can also attract journalists to your blog for information on pieces they work on for respective media houses. Their citation will significantly boost your website SEO by helping you create a healthy backlink profile.
While at it, steer clear of black hat backlinking strategies such as using spammy forums, private blog networks, and websites that have already been flagged for contravening the set rules by Google.
After 1-3 months, use Screaming Frog and Dead Link Checker tools to find broken links on articles posted on other websites. Contact the web admins with a new link to replace the broken one. A broken link check should be done monthly after the first three months to ensure all links pointing to your website are functional.
Publishing high-quality content will also get the attention of other publishers, especially if you offer detailed reviews of trending topics. They will cite your analysis in their pieces, thereby helping boost your website SEO for free.
Ensure the Web Design is Responsive
Responsive design is one of the factors Google uses to rank websites. With most people using mobile devices to conduct searches online, your website design should be responsive. It should adjust the page size to match the screen size of the mobile devices used by potential customers.
The best web design agencies can work on your website to ensure it’s responsive without charging you a fortune. Give the target customers the same user experience by testing the design on multiple mobile devices and browsers. You can also request feedback from some of the customers to pinpoint areas that should be improved.
Create Google My Business (GMB) Listing
Google My Business (GMB) is a business listing feature offered by Google to help local businesses connect better with customers. Websites whose GMB is optimised are often displayed more for localised keyword terms as opposed to their counterparts.
GMB optimisation is one of the most important local SEO hacks for businesses that operate in specific localities. Ensure that the details you input, such as the business name, location, operating hours, and services, are correct to avoid misleading customers.
You can also go the extra mile and upload high-resolution images that depict your brand to give the customers a clearer perspective. Ratings from customers will also have a significant impact on your website conversion rate. Strive to get as many positive reviews from customers as possible to stand out from the crowd.
Here is an article we recently wrote on how to optimise Google My Business. Check it out for inspiration. By applying the tips discussed in the guide, Google will fetch the information about your brand and display it in local search results for potential customers looking for a business like yours in the areas you service.
Create Attention-Grabbing Titles and Meta Descriptions
One of the main reasons why you want to rank at the top is to get more traffic. Pages that receive massive organic traffic are ranked better than those that get low traffic. For that reason, you should make sure the content attracts the searchers when your website is displayed in the SERPs.
You can achieve this goal by creating attention-grabbing titles and meta descriptions. The two are displayed in SERPs and help the searchers decide whether to click on the result or move to the next listed website.
The title should be relevant to the contents of the page or blog and compelling to attract clicks. One hack that always works is spicing up the title with words and adjectives. For example, “10 Superior Ways to Generate Revenue Online” is more compelling than a generic title such as “How to Get Sales.”
The first title is more effective in generating organic traffic as its specific and uses compelling words. The audience will know what to expect from the blog even before they click on the title. Google recommends making sure that the title tags do not exceed 60 characters and contain the core keyword.
The meta description is the small blurb displayed under the title tag. It should be a summary of the page and should not exceed 160 characters. Like in the title tag, include the core keyword to boost on-site SEO and the site’s overall discoverability.
Create Social Media Marketing Campaign
Social media platforms are known to help new businesses get a firm footing in the market. Shortly after launching your new website, you should create a page on all the major networks that the target customers use to socialise and find information, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The four are the leading social media platforms in the world today, but others such as Snapchat and WhatsApp can also boost the performance of your campaign. Craft a posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and be open to criticism as the users understand what you are offering.
Online customers love doing business with companies that care about their sentiments and needs. So, make sure that you respond to their queries promptly. If you have a busy schedule, you can delegate this task to one team member who has the necessary skills and expertise.
More importantly, monitor the results achieved from the campaigns to know which sections should be tweaked. Virtually all the platforms have an analytics page that you can use to know which type of posts generate the highest engagement levels.
Increase Brand Awareness by Investing in Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing results in 11x more ROI than other conventional digital marketing strategies. For starters, this is a strategy that entails hiring an influential social media user to promote your brand to their audience and other users.
Make sure that you check the influencer’s followers to be sure they match the description of your ideal customers. For instance, if you sell shoes or watches, look for an influencer who posts reviews or information about them on their profiles. That way, you will be marketing your brand to an already engaged audience and that is more likely to convert instead of the market to an audience that is not interested in your niche.
The renowned influencers charge high fees for this service, so it’s recommendable to start with micro-influencers. They are usually easier to work with, and their service charges are affordable. Like SEO and other advertising campaigns, monitor the results on either a biweekly or monthly basis to know if you should continue collaborating with the influencer.
Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing delivers an ROI of $44 for every $1 spent. 59% of B2B (Business to Business) digital marketers use it for lead generation. A large number of B2C marketers also rely on email to convey information and connect with customers.
If you are yet to create a subscription form to capture website visitors’ email addresses, now is the best time to create one. Make sure that the information you send is valuable to avoid your emails been marked as spam.
You can use email marketing to launch promotion campaigns or introduce new products or services. Regardless of the intent, make sure that the message is personalised to get a high open and response rate. Otherwise, if the email copy is generic or too promotional, the chances are that it will be deleted and your email address marked as spam.
Over time, you will notice some customers add products to their shopping cart but fail to complete the purchase. Use email marketing to re-engage with them to reverse the trend. You can also use it for upselling or cross-selling, depending on the target customer’s past engagement with your brand.
Looking for professional web design services in Singapore? When you finally manage to create a website for you, there’s a possibility that the site might have trouble converting visitors into customers. If you find yourself in such a situation, you are likely to wonder what is wrong with your website.
Building a website for your business is as important as any other business investment that you will make. You will have to spend money and time on professional web design services in Singapore. Nonetheless, there isn’t a guarantee that clients will automatically flock to your website.
You certainly expect your website to be the primary marketing platform of your business online. Nonetheless, it could still be failing to generate leads despite your best efforts. There could be several reasons why your website doesn’t generate new leads. Here are some of the mistakes that might be causing your site to perform poorly.
Site Speed is Slow
Your site could be generating few leads because of slow loading speeds. Site speed is one of the significant factors that Internet users consider when browsing through websites. When websites take too much time to load (more than three seconds for mobile sites and ten seconds for desktop sites), users are likely to click on the back button and visit websites that offer similar services.
Internet users expect your web pages to load quickly. You can improve page loading speed by reducing image size to less than 150KB. Large images slow down your website by making your content load slowly. Similarly, you should consider reducing the number of plugins and scripts, besides getting web hosting plans that suit your needs.
Your Site Has Too Many CTAs
Often, website owners think that if they offer users a wide selection of options, the possibility of making a purchase will be high. Nonetheless, this can backfire. If your site has too many calls to action and choices, visitors can get confused. As a result, they can experience analysis paralysis whereby they take no action.
In the e-commerce sphere, sites that have few options are likely to experience more sales than those that offer more CTAs and options. Presenting too many options to users will ultimately be detrimental to the bottom-line.
To ensure that your site converts leads, you should explicitly show your visitors the next step that they should take one they land on your pages. Similarly, remove CTAs and elements that can distract users.
Potential Clients Cannot Find Your Site
Failure to incorporate SEO best practices into your website’s text and tags is likely to make it hard for potential clients to find you on the Internet. The most convenient way to check your online presence is to undertake some online searches yourself. Check where your website shows up in search engine results.
If your site is not optimised for search engines, users may not see you when they search you online. Observing SEO best practices can lead to a significant improvement in conversions, thus impacting your bottom-line.
You Don’t Understand Your Users
It is advisable to make decisions about your website based on data garnered from visitors. Failure to do so may make it difficult for your site to meet its objectives. Inability to use data in decision-making means you are not only doing too much unnecessary work, but you are also missing out on opportunities.
You should find out about the preferences of your users, how they behave when they land on your site, and how they interact with the site. Tools such as Google Analytics can help you collect this data. By leveraging such tools, you will know what’s working for your website so that you can improve it, and what’s not working so that you make necessary adjustments.
Your Website Design is Poor
Not everyone who offers web design services in Singapore can design a site that addresses your needs as well as the needs of your visitors. When building a website, you should look at design as a business tool rather than an art. The objective of your website should be to elevate users’ experiences, communicate, clarify, and persuade.
The design that you choose should support your business objective, which is profit-making. Nonetheless, your website might be failing to convert because it has a poor design. A poorly-designed website undermines the credibility of your company, thus turning off potential clients.
You may not know that your website is designed poorly due to the personal attachment that you have to it. Getting objective feedback from your target clients will help you know about your website design. Excellent visual branding contributes significantly to marketing your website to potential customers. It creates an excellent first impression, thus making clients to trust you.
Your Site Doesn’t Have Useful Content
Poor quality content will make targeted customers to lose interest in your website. On the flipside, high-quality content can pique visitors’ interests throughout their buyer journeys. In this regard, you should create content that can address any questions that visitors might have.
If you provide high-quality content that is aligned with the needs of website visitors, Google will detect that your site has what people look for. As a result, your website and its content will be visible in search engine results. Besides having high-quality content on your website, you can attract Google’s attention by providing content on blogs and back-linking them to your site.
Site Visitors Can’t Find A Way of Contacting You
Your web design and content might be impressive, but the website may not convert leads as desired just because visitors do not have a way of contacting you. If you fail to provide emails for support questions, phone numbers for emergencies, or chatbots for any inquiries that visitors may have when browsing, they are likely to visit other sites where they can find help.
To ensure that your site can convert, make your contact information visible and accessible. You have to keep in mind the fact that if people cannot reach you, they won’t do business with you. By providing them with a communication channel, they will positively engage with you.
Forms Created By Providers of Web Design Services in Singapore Are too Long
Your company’s sales department may want a dossier on each of your leads. Nonetheless, Internet users are likely to be reluctant to fill out forms requiring them to submit personal information. Not all the information that you ask visitors to provide may be necessary, relevant, or easy to find.
You should consider cutting your forms down to bare necessities. Similarly, only collect relevant information, besides asking visitors to provide more details after you have made a connection with an initial phone call or email. By doing this, you will not only generate leads but also build trust with users since you will have created a personal connection with them.
Your Website Hasn’t Been Updated For Years
Some companies that offer web design services in Singapore don’t follow up to ensure that the websites they created get updated regularly. You should periodically add useful and relevant content to your website. Besides this, regular site improvements ought to be made.
A growth-driven design can work best for you, especially if you started the website to market a small company, which has since grown. Updates that you make to your site should be guided by user-experience data and analytics that can help you make smart adjustments that keep targeted users on the website.
As your company grows, ensure that your website design is updated to reflect the services and products that you may have added to your portfolio. A site that hasn’t been updated for years may be full of irrelevant content, which isn’t what Internet users want when they land on a website.
Your Website Performance has Never Been Tested
Before publishing your website, you must ensure that it is reviewed and A/B tested. This will help you ascertain that its design and content is relevant to the target audience. However, the buck does not stop there. You should ensure that the performance of your website is tested regularly to ensure that it is up to speed.
Without updating your website regularly, there will be diminishing returns over time. Therefore, you should always test new marketing channels, promotions, and processes. Also, you should regularly test new images, colour schemes, CTAs, and running pages on your website.
As your company grows and you update your website, you should undertake performance reviews regularly so that you understand how each aspect of the website functions. This way, you will be able to determine what works, and what doesn’t work. By addressing pitfalls that prevent your site from converting leads, you will attract clients that may have previously snubbed your site.
Your Website Isn’t Personalised
When you have a website that looks like any other, clients will be turned off. Even if your content is of high quality, customers may think that your website isn’t any different from others that look similar. For this reason, you should distinguish your website from your competitors’ sites by personalising it.
Personalising your site and using personalisation data will make it easier for you to connect with potential customers. This is particularly helpful when emailing your visitors. The addition of personal information such as names to email subject lines can go a long way in improving open rates, engagement rates, and also conversion rates.
You can also use information provided by your visitors such as interests, name, and location to create unique and engaging experiences. This is better than greeting your visitors with something similar to “hey website visitor!”
Your Site Is About You Rather Than Your Visitors
Your site and its products and services might be great. Nonetheless, if your marketing efforts are focused on telling visitors how great you are rather than how you can adequately address their needs, they will end up not buying from you. When people want to buy something, they will want to know how they will benefit.
Therefore, you must ensure that your marketing focuses on potential clients rather than you. Show them that you can help them solve the pain and struggle that they are going through and the benefits that they will get from choosing you over your competitors.
You Don’t Have a Conversion Path
One of the main reasons why websites in Singapore fail to attract a high number of clients as desired is lack of a conversion path that clients can follow. If you want visitors to take a specific action, you should create a funnel that is intended to guide them on how they can do that.
Stringing together several content pages won’t automatically put visitors on the sales funnel. Your conversion path can be as simple as a solitary landing page, which is combined with a CTA. When you create a clear conversion path, customers will feel comfortable on your website.
It will also give you data to track so that you see where visitors are abandoning, and where they are engaging. If you have more data to act on, it will be easy to design your site in a way that attracts new customers.
You are Focusing on the Wrong Audience
However excellent your website might be, it will fail to convert if you are focusing on the wrong audience. You will get no result if your content focuses on the wrong audience. Therefore, you must first identify your target audience before personalising your content to address the needs of the target audience.
The language and tone of your content must be exactly what your visitors want to see. If you are targeting a young audience, they should identify with the tone and language of your site. Focusing on the right audience will get you the desired results.
Closing Remarks
Expertly planning out your new website in Singapore will ensure that you get value for money from the project. Make sure each of these nine practical steps is taken to avoid challenges down the road. Get in touch with us for professional website design services in Singapore.
