I get it… all you feel you need is to get a low cost, placeholder website up online so that at least there’s something there: that’s you! This question came up with a recent business owner who I got talking to at a networking meeting in Cumbria.

I suggested that he invest around £2,000 in SEO basics. I also recommended ongoing work after the website is live. He would need to budget at least another £3,000 for branding, design, and building his website.

Sadly, he wasn’t in a position to take that advice for his business. He asked me if he could put his work online to showcase his business accomplishments. He wanted to display what he had already achieved. Even if it was just to create a temporary website page while he got the cash together to do the job properly.

I reluctantly told him that there was a way, but it wouldn’t help much with his business or brand recognition. He mentioned that he’d heard about something called Fiverr.com. I took a sharp intake of breath and said. “Yyyyeessss, there is that… but be careful!”

Next, we discussed using a free website builder from a hosting company or a dedicated website builder like Wix.” But he didn’t seem to like the idea of building his online brand using his own visual skills. So, I suggested that a short term solution might look something like this.

(That doesn’t kill your brand before it’s born!)

1. The Branding Decision

You need to decide firmly what your branding is going to be in the short to medium term. Even with this quick and dirty approach to getting online, it’s worth making a decision and testing out people’s reaction to you.

You might have a neat solution to helping farmers with their tax returns. Perhaps BoderlandSolutions is your brand identity. Maybe you’ve even got an idea for what your logo looks like?

As a business owner, we may not always know what will appeal to potential customers. This example shows that our perspective may not be the best.

2. Get Hold of the Domain That Reflects Your Brand

The next step is that once you’ve decided what to call your brand, you need to obtain a domain for your website. The domain is the online label that will be attached to your website so that it can be found reliably. Sign up for an account on Fasthosts, Ionos, or Freethought Internet to get a .co.uk domain. My personal favourite is Freethought Internet.

(These links are affiliate links that might pay me a small commission if you sign up via them. It doesn’t alter your price.)

If you create a quick website that’s reasonably effective, the placeholder website URL becomes a valuable asset.

Realizing that you are leasing that domain name is important, as it is a recurring annual expense. So don’t lose track of renewal dates, because someone could easily buy it away from you. That would be tragic if the domain proved to be popular. So, you’ve got the name for your website sorted out, what’s next?

3. Getting Some Basic Branding Guidelines Organised

Even with the quick dirty method of getting online, it’s worth getting some advice on branding. If you are a startup then ideally you’ll hook up with a local branding expert. You can often find help from the local Chamber of Commerce, which typically manages government funding for startups.

To keep costs low for now then one of the freelancers at Fiverr.com or People Per Hour would be the place to go. However, the notion of getting branding guidelines for $5 is long dead!

People per Hour is a much more professional platform with generally more experienced people available. It is however, significantly costlier.

Don’t just get a logo and think that is your brand. Try to get a style guide for the brand, which includes Colours, and suggested fonts for web. I was taught to use no more than 3 colors for the logo.

When creating a cheap website, ask for a logo that is square or circular. This will make it easier to use. It’s generally easier to fit these into the slots that low cost website templates have available.

You might think that you are ready to give your designer the instructions for the website but no! You need to write the copy (the words) for your homepage, portfolio and service pages.

The designer will know what space is needed for the actual content. You also need to try and pull together good quality photos as well. That’s better than relying on some future designer you might choose, downloading a load of stock images.

4. Basic keyword Research

You need to understand how your customers are searching for what you offer, so that you can present it to them in their language. This topic could fill an entire article. Here is a quick overview of how to identify the best keywords for your website content.

Business owners often focus too much on their own perspective. This can cause them to miss connecting with their target audience. They may not use language that resonates with their customers. So…

a. Google Keyword Planner

First, sit down with someone trusted, who could ideally, be a potential customer. Brainstorm a list of phrases people might use to search for your offer. Treat this list as a set of starting points for your keyword research.

Why work with someone else? Because you will get an outside perspective of how people might search for your products or services.

If you have a Google account you might want to access Google’s own keyword data by opening a Google Ads account. You don’t have to start any campaigns or hand over your payment details at this point.

https://app.screencast.com/qSCVDbwKhUjLG

Find the Google Ads page and go to the Google Keyword planner in the Tools section of the ads account. Type one of your keyword seeds, from your brainstorming session, into the suggestion box of the planner tool and let Google do its magic. The tool displays a grid of keyword ideas. It also provides basic information on monthly search volume, trends, and competition level for top ad placement.

Remember that Google uses this method to draw you into a paid advertising campaign. The data is only for the ads auction, not organic search visibility. It is extremely helpful to provide a general idea of which keywords would be advantageous in your content. The video briefly explains the process, but this is just a basic overview of keyword research.”

You may not be able or willing to access Google Ads, so here are a couple of alternatives.

b. The ICT Keyword Generator

This is a very simple to use piece of software that you can add to your Chrome browser. You provide one of your seed keywords and it will come up with a list of suggestions. These are downloadable as a csv or you can create a plain text list and copy, to paste into a permanent list. The video shows how this particular browser extension works.

https://app.screencast.com/wt3WRC8vForQt

This isn’t a tool to use if you are easily distracted. When you stop paying attention to the conversation, it disappears and you have to begin again. The search results rank from 1 to 10 each time you search.

Our test search was agricultural accountants. I think the phrases are listed by how often they are searched. Then, the next round adds an “a” to the seed term and generates another set of up to 10 phrases. And it goes through the alphabet until it has tracked down all the phrases it thinks are relevant. These starting points are very helpful for organising your website copy.

c. Letting Artificial Intelligence Do Your Keyword Research

You might consider using an AI like Chat GPT for keyword research. It’s important to remember that this GPT was trained on data up to around 2021. This means it may not have the most recent numbers.

If you can’t use Google Ads or don’t want to add more clutter to your browser, this approach can be helpful. It can be a useful alternative in those situations.

Setting context and parameters of your prompt explicitly is important. UK businesses should tell Chat GPT that they want ideas from the UK database of Google or Bing. They should also specify their preference for British English spellings and language before entering their keywords. Here is the output from a search set up for agricultural accountants.

https://app.screencast.com/nLe9a48DY77BJ

This is probably the least robust way of doing your quick dirty keyword research.

5. Write the Website Copy

Write the copy for the homepage and the portfolio using the keyword research results. You will choose 1 or 2 target keywords for each page you plan on creating. The homepage keywords will be Your brand name, the main type of service you offer and your location if important. So for my mythical agricultural accountancy practice, I might look at Cassidy’s Agricultural Accountants Carlisle Cumbria and Borders.

The homepage is the landing page you want people to arrive at if they are looking for you by name. When you create your website, focus on highlighting the main service or product you offer. Also, emphasize the specific areas you are targeting.

For each page of your website, there are several elements you need to be aware of before you write a word.

• The Title Tag: Make sure that it includes your keywords that are relevant to the page. Aim to make it about 57 characters in length, but don’t stress too much about this. This just ensures that the whole tag is visible in the search results page.
  If your keyword combinations are too long for the text, feel free to include all relevant keywords. Google will still process them. DON’T stuff every single keyword you can think of into it. For the home page it’s strictly Brand, Category, Location! For Service pages the format : Service keyword, locations and then if there is room your brand seems to work best.
• The Meta Description: This expands on the gist of the title tag keywords and turns them into a sentence or two that’s an eye catching pitch to encourage people to click on your listing and visit YOUR website.
• When writing your copy, make sure to include the target keywords in the Main Heading (H1). Use related keywords in your subheadings to clearly convey the focus of your business. Show what makes your brand special and unique on the homepage. Save the full details of your business for later. The homepage is about what you are offering the visitor (What’s In It For Them).
• Tell your brand story on the About page if visitors want to dig deeper into your tale.
• Each Distinct service or product should really have its own page: each with its own relevant keywords from your keyword research. Don’t use the same keyword on multiple pages. This will make them compete with each other instead of your real competitors.

Chat GPT can be used to help, but tends to produce pretty bland generic content. In most cases it’s good for setting out a structure for each page, if you feed it the keywords and their importance and then get it to provide a structure for you to write the content into.

6. Images and Brand Assets

Gather photos and any branding together into a folder. Never use photos straight out of the camera. Edit them so they are no bigger than 1920 X 1080 pixels in size.

Files that come straight off the camera’s data card are far too big for website use. They will slow down page loading when someone visits you. They will often abandon a visit to your website if it loads slowly, especially on mobiles. If you’re new to image editing, Canva or my favorite quick image editor Irfan View (Link takes you to free download) are both easy to learn.

Here’s a very quick, rough and ready video of a quick size reduction with Irfan View.

https://app.screencast.com/yCGlAoVDaZ7zx

7. Finally – You Can Get Your Website Designed!

After you have finished writing your copy and organizing your photo assets, you can select and brief your website designer. You can find designers on the same two platforms mentioned earlier, Fiverr and People per Hour.

Have your branding guidelines, logos, images and copy to hand. Give your designer at least two example websites that you like the look of. This gives a guide to the designer about what he or she should be aiming to beat! Before you accept an offer, be sure that the designer can migrate the draft website to your hosting before you agree payment.

8. Web Hosting

You need someone, somewhere, to let you keep the files that make your website work, on one of their computers where the world can find them. This is hosting.

I would recommend that you use the same company you bought the domain from to host your website. My three suggestions still tend to be Fasthosts, Ionos or Freethought Internet. Confirm with the designer that they can export their design to your chosen hosting account before parting with your cash.

9. Expectations – Keeping it Real

Don’t expect “the moon on a stick” for this quick, dirty website design approach. Low cost designers will use a template based website. They will tweak it to accommodate your information and visuals. They should also be able to accommodate your basic branding guidelines as well.

It’s now time to cross your fingers and wait till your website design is produced. You should getthe option of 1 or 2 revisions within the agreed cost, but this is NOT going to be a masterpiece of design. When you are happy with the design, get the website migrated to your hosting and switched on.

10. Domain Based Email

Your domain will have email capabilities. It’s always more professional looking to have a domain based email address rather than a generic Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email account. Get it live – and set up forwarding to Gmail or similar if you don’t want to set it up on Microsoft 365. You can also attach that email to your Gmail account if you want to!

11. Getting Google and Bing to Start Taking Notice of Your New Website

List your business in at least the following business listing services once website is live.

a.     Cumbria Business Growth Hub

b.     Carlisle Ambassadors

c.     Yell

d.     Brownbook

e.     FreeIndex

f.       Cylex

Lots of other ideas here: A Local Citation Sites List For UK Businesses Boost Local SEO (climbhighseo.agency)

12. Google Business Profile and Bing Places

Once those initial few listings are in place and live; then create a Google Business Profile and a Bing Places listing. If you are already listed in several other listing sites it is more likely that you will be able to easily verify these important listings.

For locally focussed businesses these are vital listings, but the two major search engines have become increasingly twitchy about letting new businesses open their profiles to public view. Having listings in other reasonably important listing sites first, helps the big search engines have a bit more trust in you as a business entity. If you can combine that with some press coverage as well, you will have an easier time of getting these listings live!

In conclusion, this isn’t the quickest or cheapest way to create a temporary website presence. However, by going through these steps you will begin to define your brand. When you go to the next stage and engage a more professional designer to create your own bespoke website you will have built up some idea of how your initial branding ideas are received and be able to give some better requirements to your chosen professional.

In addition yopu will have gained some SEO benefits by using keywords appropriately, having got yourself listed in several dierectories and by having been around for more than a year! 

With good fortune the placeholder website may even bring some fresh business your way as well! 

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