If your client plans to run an online business, it’s a no-brainer that they must have a website. But even for a brick-and-mortar establishment, having a business website has become non-negotiable in this digital age – if they want to reach as many customers as possible, that is. And we’ll show you how to build a business website for your clients with Backline’s white-label hosting + template solution, delivered under your agency’s brand.
Gone are the days when designing websites was reserved for geeks and programming wizzes. With drag-and-drop website design software, you don’t need to know how to code to design a beautiful and fully functional website.
However, most ‘drag-n-drop’ website software on the market today only gives you basic, cookie-cutter design tools and leaves you hanging. You’d still have to decide on where to register a domain name, find the right hosting package, and choose the right CMS.
Backline’s Hosting + Template solution gives your agency all the tools you need to take a client from idea to a fully functional WordPress website in one place, plus all the follow-up support you’d need to keep that website functioning properly. Everything ships under your brand, and we stay invisible to your client.
In the rest of this piece, we’ll discuss why your clients need a website, the steps to build a website from scratch, and how Backline’s template + hosting solution makes every step easy for your agency.
Why do your clients need a business website?
We use the internet to find everything these days – from the closest restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels nearby, to buying advice and pointers on what to look out for before we purchase a product or service. With a well-designed website, you can position your client’s business where their potential customers are looking.
And if your client is an eCommerce business, their website serves as the consolidation point for all their marketing efforts – from social media ads, to email ads and PPC, when it’s time for a customer to make a purchase, they’ll be redirected to the checkout page on the website.
Having a website has also become an insignia for credibility. When people hear about a brand for the first time, they expect to see a website that highlights what the business is about and if it can meet their needs. And speaking of credibility, the website is the best place to show positive reviews and testimonials from previous customers so your client can create social proof and encourage a purchase.
So now that you know having a website is important for your clients, how exactly do you create one, and how can we make it breezy and easy for your agency? Let’s dive in!
Steps to build a business website
Figure out the website’s purpose
Whether your client is setting up a blog, a portfolio website, a company website, or an eCommerce store, stating the purpose of the website clearly will help you choose the right tools to use and decide on the structure it needs to have.
With a portfolio website, you’ll be creating a portal that gives potential clients information on your client, their services, and past projects. You’ll also be showcasing testimonials from previous clients.
With a blog, you’ll be creating a hub that gives readers information on topics and questions they may have on a particular subject matter.
And with a company website and eCommerce store, the website will serve as the central point for potential customers to find more information about your client’s business and if it can fulfill their needs.
Choose a business website template from our suite
The quickest way to get a website up and running in no time is to use already-designed templates with editable fields that you can just replace or tweak with your client’s content.
Backline offers your agency a gallery of over 100 exclusively business website templates to choose from that have been carefully designed considering the look and feel that a website for that particular business should have.
Select a plan and template, and all the magic happens behind the scenes to have the website designed for you in 1 minute. And the best part? You don’t even need to install the template you choose. Once the website is ready, you can then make all the edits and add images relevant to your client’s brand.
Using a website template saves your agency the time and money a UI or web designer would charge. And with our templates, you can also get ideas to get even more creative with the website’s design.
Buy a domain name/register social media handles
After deciding on the website’s purpose and the right template that perfectly visualizes your client’s brand image, it’s time to register the brand’s domain name as well as matching social media handles.
The domain name is the web address that web searchers will type into their browsers to visit the website and is also the link you’ll be placing in ads when promoting your client’s products and services.
For example, clikitcare.com is a domain name that lands visitors on a homepage. Ideally, your client’s domain name should be an exact match or very closely matched to their business name so that people can find them easily.
It is also a good practice to register the domain name right after registering the business name to protect the brand from domain squatters – people who will try to register a domain name similar to a business’s and then try to make a profit by reselling it at ridiculous prices or stealing potential visitors who taught they were visiting that website.
You also need to consider the top-level domain (TLD) or domain extension when registering a domain. The domain extension is what comes after the last dot in the domain name. So in ‘clikitcare.com’, the ‘.com’ is the domain extension.
You want to register the domain with the ‘.com’ if it’s available as well as other popular extensions like the ‘.net’, ‘org’, and even more descriptive extensions like ‘.business’.
Use Backline’s free domain name searcher tool to check the availability of a domain name and register it at retail price without any extra costs on renewal.
When searching for a domain name, try incorporating keywords that are descriptive so users can tell what the business is about right away. But remember to keep them short and memorable.
You could also go with a brandable domain name – a unique name that your client will build their brand into so that they stand out.
In the end, remember that the domain name is a critical part of your client’s brand and is the name their potential customers will associate with them.
Choose a hosting provider
Next, it’s time to choose a web hosting provider. Aka the web host, a web hosting provider rents space on the internet to store website content so that the website is available online, and connects the website to every search made on the domain name.
If you plan to build a client’s website on WordPress, then you want a managed WordPress hosting plan where all the technical aspects of managing the website are delegated to the web host so your agency can focus on growing the client’s audience and conversions.
Backline offers some of the most affordable managed WordPress hosting plans on the market with all the goodies offered only by gold-standard providers – free email accounts, free SSL certificates, detailed site analytics, daily backups, free migration, etc. – all white-labeled so it ships under your agency’s brand.
And the best part? Our hosting packages are WooCommerce-ready for all your client’s eCommerce needs. You get access to beautifully crafted eCommerce website templates to get a shop up and buzzing in no time.
Decide on the website structure and pages
How a website is structured directly determines how easily visitors will find information about the business. As a core factor in user experience, the website should be structured in a way that potential customers will be able to confirm if your client can meet their needs very quickly.
Irrespective of the business niche, the website should have:
Homepage
The homepage is the brand’s first contact point with potential customers visiting the website. Here’s where you want to make a super strong first impression and build credibility.
The content on the homepage should immediately tell visitors the brand’s core product or service. The homepage should also have attractive images, short and crisp copy, well-placed call-to-action buttons, and all text should be in a pleasing, easy-to-read font.
About Us page
From the homepage, there should be a direct link to the ‘About Us’ page in the header and footer sections telling visitors about the history of the business – the mission, how it started, the goals, and any achievements.
The ‘About Us’ page is also a good place to show the face(s) behind the brand and you can add a gallery with photos of the team members so potential customers feel more connected to the business.
Contact page
Many potential customers will have inquiries and may want to reach out before committing. The website should have a dedicated contact page with several contact portals. The contact page can contain – the business phone line, email, social media handles, skype ID, and a contact form to build a leads list.
You should also include the physical address if your client is a brick-and-mortar store as well as the opening and closing hours.
Blog
Having a dedicated blog on the website is an excellent way to optimize the website for SEO and grow organic traffic. Have a content schedule where you publish blog posts with extensive answers to general questions potential customers may have about topics in the client’s niche.
FAQs
If your client is selling a unique product or service, it’s important to have a dedicated FAQ/knowledgebase page that answers questions about the offering.
From pages explaining how a product or different features in a service suite work, to how-to guides and ‘getting started’ tips, the FAQ page should answer every possible question a potential customer may have about the product.
Testimonials/case studies page
Testimonials, positive reviews, and case studies are a great way to build credibility for a brand and make potential customers more willing to do business with your client.
You can have a dedicated testimonials page that outlines positive reviews from people who have done business with the client in the past. If your client is selling a service, you can also have case studies that go in-depth into the details of specific past clients outlining the client’s needs, the strategy map, how it was executed to solve the problem, and the positive results it yielded.
Set up the payment method
If your client plans to collect payments from potential customers on the website, you need to have a payment portal in place.
Most eCommerce website building software including Backline’s comes eCommerce-ready, with built-in payment solutions. Alternatively, you could sign up with a popular payment processor and integrate their payment solutions into the website via their API or low-code/pre-built solutions.
Fill in content with a focus on SEO
Now it’s time to fill the pages with relevant content but keep SEO and user experience in mind.
Keep the content short and straight to the point so that the pages don’t look clunky. At the same time, make sure to integrate primary keywords related to the brand naturally into the content (especially the homepage).
Test… test… test… then publish
After filling in the content, it’s time to test the website. Test… test… test… and test again to make sure everything is working properly. Load the website on different browsers to make sure it is being rendered properly. Then test each button and click on every link to make sure none are broken.
Next, test the website extensively across different devices – mobile phones, tablets, desktops, and PCs. Google, and many other search engines today have a mobile-first approach to ranking websites. Meaning, they give websites that load properly and quickly on mobile devices higher rankings since most of the searches made to the website will be on mobile devices.
If the website is built on WordPress, consider using a WordPress staging tool. A staging tool allows you to test different tweaks to the website’s code and design safely in a controlled environment, without affecting the main live website.
Hit publish!
Promote the website – social media, email, paid ads
After the website goes live, it’s time to promote the business and direct potential leads to the domain. Remember the social media handles you registered along with the domain name? Set up the social media accounts as business accounts and launch ads on them.
When setting up ads on social media like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, you’ll be able to set the total ad spend, the demographic you want to target, the topics you want to appear in search for, as well as the duration over which the ad spend will be distributed.
You can also consider pay-per-click campaigns on search engines like Google and Bing. Once the website starts to get visits and leads through the contact forms, you can start setting up email campaigns to nurture leads into loyal customers.
Invest in SEO
Paid ads are a great way to get a business in front of potential customers quickly, but to establish your client’s business as an authority in its industry and attract the best potential customers who are far more likely to convert, you’d need to invest in SEO.
The initial phases of the website’s SEO will involve technical SEO – setting up the website’s backend to make sure it can be accessed easily by search engine crawlers. Then you’d have to optimize the pages (also called on-page SEO) by infusing the right keywords, formatting them so they are incredibly easy to read, setting up HTML tags, optimizing the images with alt text, etc.
However, the bulk of the SEO will focus on the posts and articles published on the blog. The best approach to a website’s SEO is to bring in an SEO specialist and an SEO content writer to manage everything for you.
An SEO specialist will do the technical SEO and on-page SEO for the critical pages – homepage, about us, etc. – as well as carry out topic and keyword research and then build content briefs that the SEO writer will create articles around.
With a well-executed SEO strategy, you’ll be investing long-term into the website’s performance in search engines and it will start to attract clicks from searches people are making that contain keywords relevant to the business.
Monitor SEO performance and maintain the website
Monitoring the results of SEO campaigns is incredibly important and will help you figure out what works and what’s not. By linking the website with a website analytics tool like Google Analytics (GA), you have live data on important metrics to the website’s success like clicks, conversions, average time spent on a page, bounce rate, etc.
Many marketing experts suggest setting up website analytics early on once you’re done with technical SEO and a tool like GA, meshes seamlessly with Google Search Console to help you test the website, fix any indexing issues, monitor traffic, and optimize search visibility.
Frequently checking that the website software – CMS, themes, and plugins – is up to date is a critical part of its maintenance. Using outdated software can put a website’s security at risk.
Backline monitors SEO performance, updates software, and backs up website data for your agency, on autopilot. Our managed WordPress hosting plans cater to both regular (non-commerce) and eCommerce websites, and whether your client is looking to set up a blog or an eCommerce store, your agency gets all it needs in one place – delivered under your own brand, with us invisible in the background.
