You want to optimize your website for SEO and Social Media.
Are you sick of having a website that doesn’t perform? Looking for ways to generate leads on a regular basis? Want to find how to best get to the top of Google? All of these are great reasons for building a new site. After all, many of the older sites are 100% invisible to Google, and don’t feed through Facebook, Twitter and the other sites the way it should. Read More →
When was the last time you completely overhauled your site?
The general rule of thumb is you should completely revamp at least the look of your site every three years, and possibly the functionality every five years. If you can’t remember when the last time you completely revamped your website was, then that is a good indication that it may be time for a redo, simply because technology and design trends have probably changed significantly since then.
Cleaning and freshening up is part of life, so why not clean up your outdated website while you are at it?
For many customers and potential customers, there is no bigger turn off than an outdated website. Whether it is a lack of fresh content, stale photos and videos, or a combination of the two, an outdated website can be more harmful than you think – especially if you are trying to attract new customers. Read More →
The business world is full of people with unique personalities and interests. One way to ensure your success in the future is to find a client with a similar personality and goals as your own. In doing so, you are showing the client that you are interested in forming a lasting relationship. Read More →
In today’s fast-paced and technology-centered society, emails and short text messages are the norm. While these forms of communication are fine, you can make yourself stand out more and build a substantial relationship with your clients if you take a few extra minutes to insert something personal into your next message. Read More →
This is a rather simple tip, but it goes a long way. If you are setting up a website for Sally’s Shoes, for example, you will want to incorporate the company name into the URL. Read More →
No, we don’t mean copy what they are doing. That wouldn’t be cool. Read More →
The business case for having a good website packed with valuable content is very strong. Many people now realise that 60% of a sale happens before clients get in touch (or don’t — as the case may be). Your website plays an increasingly important part in the path to new business.
But it’s often sheer embarrassment that finally flicks the switch between “we really must get round to doing something about our website” to “we need to do it NOW”.
Worse than driving away potential leads (who we’ll never meet and can therefore ignore), a poor website makes it difficult to look our best amongst people we respect and want to do business with.
Having an embarrassing website is like having a really messy house. You just don’t want to bring people back there. Ring any bells?
Here are six signs that you’re embarrassed by your website:
1.Like the spooky house on the corner, no one’s touched your website in years. It’s creaking at the seams. You daren’t even look in some places. It feels like it’s covered in cobwebs. If you dig too deep a skeleton will fall out of a cupboard or a bat will fly in your face.
2.It’s like a ghost ship. Your website is haunted by the ghosts of people who left the company months ago, and the spectre of ideas you’ve moved on from. You’d change it if you could, only changing anything is so difficult, so you just avoid sending people to it.
3.There’s no room at the inn. Look, you’d like to add some new content, but where’s it going to go? Your website isn’t a house, it’s a tiny caravan, and there’s no space for anything else. It’s just not up to the job. 4.You’ve lost the plot. There are so many words but no one understands what you’re saying. Your website just doesn’t make it clear what you do. (In fact, you’re so mired in the wrong words that you’re finding it hard to explain it too).
5.Your website looks like it was decorated by Laurence Llewelyn Bowen c.1993. Web fashions change. If too much frippery detracts from your message or the design gets in the way it just feels wrong. If your website fees like a rag rolling disaster, or a gold spray painted cherub fiasco, you’ll want people to stay well away.
6.It has childhood bedroom syndrome. Your business is growing. You’ve changed. You’re clear what you offer, and how you help your clients but your website hasn’t caught up. Taking people back to the website is like trying to have a serious business conversation in a room decorated in Noddy wallpaper. You’ll do anything to avoid it.
If this sounds like your website, then it’s time to take action.
The internet has helped level the playing field for smaller companies, putting you in front of a global audience for minimal costs.
But just getting people to visit your website is not enough. You need to reassure them you are a safe place to buy from – and that isn’t always easy.
Many consumers are still too scared to shop online – and the lack of a big-name brand behind your business can add to the customer fear factor.
It is all very well having access to a global market, but if potential customers feel unsafe transacting with you, your e-commerce strategy is not worth the paper it’s written on.
Small firms can do just as good a job online as bigger brands, but you have to demonstrate that you are fully up-to-date with security measures. First, though, you need to understand customers’ concerns.
These typically include the risk of identity theft and financial fraud stemming from the unauthorised release of personal information, receiving viruses or other malicious software from you, and the legitimacy of your business.
Strengthening your business’ e-commerce security is the most important thing you can do to quell customer fears. To do this, you should carry out a risk analysis of your e-commerce site. It’s also worth looking at sites you respect to see what they offer in terms of security. If in doubt, bring in a third-party consultant to check your site.
To keep hackers and malicious software from attacking your system, you need security software like a firewall and regularly updated anti-virus and anti-spyware software.
You also need to restrict access to consumer information to those who strictly need it, and then ensure that access is controlled, for example through password-activated application controls. Make sure that staff know of the importance of strong passwords (which use non-obvious combinations of numbers and letters) as well as the need to change them frequently.
If you take payments online, ensure your site is payment card industry compliant and use encryption on all areas of the site which take personal information.
Even if your site is secure, you need to demonstrate it to potential customers before they are likely to buy from you. Most internet shoppers will recognise the signs of secure web pages – the https:// page prefix and the padlock symbol in their web browser – but these only appear once a customer has reached the transaction stage.
Demonstrate you take customer security fears seriously by addressing them early on in their ‘shopping trip’. Provide clear contact details, including your full postal address and a phone number – it helps demonstrate that you are a genuine business and have nothing to hide.
Be upfront about your delivery and returns policy. Concerns over returning goods are one of the main things that stop people from buying online.
Adding background about your business’ trading history along with customer testimonials will further endorse your credibility. You should also list any professional or trade bodies which you belong to. Membership of any accredited body will help reassure visitors that you are trustworthy.
By addressing online shoppers’ security concerns you will increase the chance that they make a purchase – and when they’ve bought from you once and had a secure experience, they are more likely to return.
You may have heard of something called a BOUNCE RATE when people talk about website stats. It may be one of the mystical phrases that web designers talk about that actually means nothing to most business owners. Basically a bounce rate is how many people land on your website and then leave instantly – they just bounce off your website
This may be hard for you to gauge unless you have special analytics software running on your site that lets you see what visitors are doing. Google Analytics is excellent in this case and is free to sign up and put on your site. If you have Google Analytics or another service, look through your stats to see if people are navigating deeper into your site. Often, there are metrics and things already calculated for you to tell you this, but if not then take a look at the last couple of weeks worth of visitors.
If you are starting to lose visitors, then you should either take a look at your home page to see if you can make it more enticing, or consider a complete redesign of your site to make visitors want to navigate further into your site and read what you have to say.
Is your site slowly losing visitors over time?
Very closely related to finding out if visitors are navigating past your home page is to see if there is a slowing trend in visitors coming to your site at all. Are you finding that visitors are not coming as often as they had before? If so you may want to consider revamping either the content on your site or your entire site to entice more visitors to come and visit.
While having a slowing trend in visitors may not mean a complete redesign is necessary, it is often a good indicator that either your SEO is not working for you or your site is becoming stale. More than likely the latter of the two. When your site starts looking like it hasn’t been updated in a while, visitors will be turned off and will go elsewhere for their needs. Search engines will also not rank you favorably in this case either, as they like sites that are constantly being updated with new content.
Of course all this is dependant on one very important factor – does your website have any means of tracking your website’s traffic? If not then maybe you need to talk to a website designer who can help you so you can monitor your sites performance.
Want to know how your website can help you?