Alpaca Learning Library

Building a Successful Alpaca Web Site

You’ve done your homework. You know alpaca ranching is the business for you, and you’re prepared to invest in marketing to help make your business profitable.

While the alpaca farmer faces dozens of alternatives for marketing his or her ranch, none has the potential to create such great reach in so short a time as an alpaca website.

Let’s look at best practices that have emerged for this Web 2.0 environment and how you can take advantage of them to add value to your alpaca website and business – whether you’re a veteran of the alpaca industry or just starting out.

Provide the Information Your Audience Wants

A good alpaca website will provide plenty of useful information. The type of information you’ll want to make available depends on the needs of your customers.

The majority of your prospective customers fall into two groups:

Existing alpaca farmers looking to purchase alpacas and related services, and

Potential alpaca ranchers who are researching the business.

To capture and hold the attention of your most immediate customers – those looking to purchase animals or services within the next month – you'll want to convey as many details as possible about your alpaca farm. And especially about your alpacas.

A rancher looking for alpacas for sale wants to see photos and learn as much as possible about a specific alpaca on your website before contacting you about purchasing it. This includes basic statistics like age and breed as well as more advanced details like histogram (record of fiber quality), who the alpaca has been bred to, any progeny and registration certificate.

The more information you provide, the more time you’ll save yourself and your prospect. Those who contact you are likely to be closer to buying, since they've already had a chance to review all your information online. In addition, people will be more comfortable dealing with you if they've had the chance to get to you know you by reading extensively about your alpaca farm online before contacting you.

While the second audience your website may appeal to might not be ready to purchase within the next couple of weeks, you have the opportunity to start building a relationship with the next generation of alpaca farmers.

And eventually these new ranchers will be looking to build their farm’s inventory of livestock. If your website is a credible source of information during their research phase, you may also be the farm they turn to for their alpaca purchases and breeding services.

Posting plenty of valuable content on your alpaca website also assists with another important consideration for a successful alpaca website: search engine optimization…

Make Sure Your Website Shows Up Where Your Audience is Searching

It's not enough to simply have a great-looking website. You need to make sure it can be found easily online, too.

If you type the search term "alpacas" in Yahoo! or Google, you can see that nearly two million results show up. And few searchers are willing to click beyond the first few pages…

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps alpaca websites achieve greater exposure online, making it possible for a website to rank high in search engine results when people search on targeted keywords.

While the keyword “alpacas” may be too competitive a term to aim for ranking when you first start out, ranking high for terms like “alpacas for sale” can be extremely lucrative for alpaca ranchers. It provides an advantage in much the same way a retail store in a prime location gets more foot traffic – except in this case your prime location is those first couple of pages in search results online.

SEO requires extremely specialized knowledge, and it is becoming a necessary component of alpaca websites that wish to achieve success online. Many alpaca website owners enlist the assistance of a search engine optimization company, such as www.seoalpaca.com, to design their alpaca website and to achieve their ranking goals. This eliminates the risk of having to redo your website later because your designer unintentionally used tactics that prevent your site from showing up in the search engines.

Link Your Alpaca Website with the Alpaca Community

Developing incoming links to your website is an important component for search engine optimization and also building your farm’s reputation online.

Both the search engines and your prospective customers view your website as more important if you have high-quality links pointing to your site. Joining and participating in online communities such as the Ideal Alpaca Community can give you an advantage.

Listing your site with high-quality directories helps you earn prestige by association for your farm as well as bolster performance in search engines. Ask your alpaca search engine optimization company for guidance, as they may operate portal sites and directories that can help boost your performance.

Create a Point of Differentiation for Your Alpaca Website

What’s different about your alpaca farm? Why should your website visitors be interested in doing business with you instead of with your competition?

Creating and communicating a unique brand image for your alpaca website is becoming increasingly important as more and more alpaca farms go online. You don’t want to appear to be “just like all the others”.

Here are three ideas to help you show your difference:

Emphasize an important aspect of the alpaca business that your competitors are not capitalizing on. This could be as involved as featuring livestock that can’t be found readily at other farms or as simple as offering a unique service or something of value that will benefit your customers.

Design can help set your alpaca website apart visually. Use your design to communicate your uniqueness and establish a personal rapport with your audience. For example, really great photographs can help you build viral marketing, as people may tell their friends to visit your site for funny alpaca photos.

The content you provide on your alpaca website and how it is written can help set you apart. If you keep an informal blog of activities on your alpaca farm, for example, alpaca ranchers may be more likely to return often to your website.

Write Your Alpaca Website Copy with a Focus on Your Customers

While many alpaca owners may enjoy the writing process themselves, it's important to bear in mind the best practices that a specialized website copywriter would follow.

Two guiding principles you should keep in mind are: target your copy for your audience (not just for your farm), and make your copy easy to read.

The tips below illustrate a few ways you can achieve this.

Use "you"-oriented language rather than always starting with “we” and “our”.

Vary sentence and paragraph length for easier reading on the screen.

Use a conversational style in your writing.

Use subheadings to introduce main points and help draw the eye down the page.

Incorporate calls to action to encourage site visitors to take the action you want them to.

Use important keywords with optimized frequency and placement.

Your alpaca website copy should be based on the goals you have set for the site - each word on your site should support those goals, in language that engages the reader.

Provide Multiple Ways for Customers to Interact with You

You want people to contact you from your alpaca website, right? So make it easy for them.

The “contact” page is where you would list all your contact information such as email, phone, fax, physical address and a map. However, providing multiple contact options throughout your website can help make it easier to contact you. This may be as simple as including your phone number and email address on every web page, so a prospect can pick up the phone as soon as they see something they want to ask you about - without clicking around to find how to get in touch.

Keep in mind that although you might prefer the phone as a contact method, some of your prospects might prefer email or chat. So offering all the options you possibly can makes sure you don’t alienate any potential customers.

Also, collecting the contact information of site visitors can give you access to some powerful tools for follow-up with prospective alpaca buyers.

Offer incentives for site visitors to enter their email address or contact information. You could offer a special discount, a valuable report or e-book, or even less tangible rewards such as being among the first to find out about new livestock at your alpaca farm.

Once a prospect has given you their email address, you're in a position to start building a stronger relationship with them, capturing future business that would otherwise be lost. Most of this can be automated using simple technology to create an alpaca farm newsletter or autoresponders series.

Make Your Alpaca Website Easy to Use

Have you ever found yourself lost on a website, unable to get back to a certain page? Navigation is the system that lets visitors move from page to page on your website, easily seeing where they are and where they want to go.

Keep in mind that people are primarily looking for information. So make sure it’s easy to find. Forego fancy graphics and distractions like moving elements in favor of simple structure and easy-to-read fonts.

Make sure that any links are obvious - these are important in helping to pull the reader’s eye through the text as well as directing the reader to where they can find more information on topics.

Ease of use is one of those basic considerations that no one may comment on if it’s done well. But if your alpaca site is not easy to use, you're going to lose site visitors who become frustrated because they can’t find their way around easily.

Track Your Alpaca Website's Performance

One of the greatest benefits of the online medium is that nearly everything can be tracked. A one-page ad in an issue of Alpacas Magazine may cost over $1,000, but the publisher can’t tell you how many people noticed your ad.

Unlike a print ad, you can know exactly how many people visited your alpaca website. In fact, many website hosting plans will include a basic website stats package that will show you what days of the month and time of day people visited your site. This can provide feedback even for your other forms of marketing, as you’ll be able to see spikes in activity due to people visiting your website after an alpaca show you attended, for example.

These programs can also show you where your site visitors clicked from to get to your site as well as keywords that brought them to your alpaca website from the search engines. Armed with this information, you can further hone your keyword strategy and relationships with linking partners that are bringing traffic to your alpaca website.

If you want to gather even more information, there are programs with advanced capabilities, such as www.seotrends.com, which lets you track the use and conversion of your alpaca website pages as well as provide feedback on ROI for your advertising efforts.

It’s important to note that a successful alpaca website requires an ongoing commitment. You’ll need to update content, monitor search engine performance, and modify design as your audiences’ needs evolve. But keep the basic elements above in mind and you’ll be well on your way to enjoying the benefits of a successful alpaca website.

Copyright 2006 - 2008 SEO Advantage.

About the author: Lisa Banks is marketing director and senior alpaca copywriter at SEO Advantage, a web design and SEO firm serving the Ideal Alpaca Community with SEO Alpaca services since 2000. Learn more about custom alpaca website design and search engine optimization today at www.seoalpaca.com.