Help your website work harder for business

If you suspect your website could work harder to help your business grow, you’re probably right. Most sites I’ve looked at during nearly 20 years as a website developer need a bit of work. Here are my recommendations to help your site reach its full potential as a powerful tool in your marketing efforts.
Profile your market. You need to understand your customers or clients so you can focus your website on what interests them. List their age range, gender, educational and income level and anything else that defines them. If you sell to different market segments, define each and decide whether one message will work for all.
If your market segments are significantly different, you may need to create different messages for each.
Set goals. In most cases you want site visitors to learn how your products and/or services meet their wants and needs. Just as important, you need to tell them the advantages you offer over your competitors. Then you’ll want visitors to take the next step, contact you to move the sales process forward.
I recommend you do your audience profile and goal setting in writing. That really helps sharpen your focus for your entire website.
Write for your audience. Your website shouldn’t be about you. It should focus on your prospects – what they need to know to be persuaded to do business with you.
This is critical for the statement on your homepage, where you’ll either hold or lose prospects. Studies show that most visitors won’t spend much time at your site if they can’t get the information they want easily. A few clicks and they are gone, with it your sale, maybe forever.
Make your opening statement all about how your products and/or services meet your prospects wants and needs better than anyone else. Be brief. Organize your website into clearly labeled sections so visitors can easily find the information they want. Throughout the site keep your text to a minimum. Write it, put it aside for at least a day, edit it then edit it again for spelling, punctuation, grammar – but especially brevity. “Big” words and complex sentences don’t communicate well. Keep it simple.
Don’t knock your competition. That doesn’t make you look good and it doesn’t generate business.
Keep graphics simple. People go to your website for information not entertainment. So think twice about swirling logos, animation and flashing photos. They can take time to load, frustrating visitors, but worse distracting them from text you want them to focus on.
However, for certain types of companies, it may be helpful or even essential to show some visual creativity.
• Select colors that are appropriate to your type of business. Don’t use white type “dropped out” of a solid color for any sizable amount of text. It is difficult to read. Also running text over photos and artwork makes it hard to read. Use type faces that are easy to read on computer and mobile device screens – especially if your market is over 35. Consider testimonials. Saying great things about yourself isn’t terribly believable and can come across as unsupported boasting. But when others praise you, it is more believable and powerful.
• Scatter customer testimonials throughout your site. They should be short, generally no more than 50 words.
• Make it easy for people to reach you. List your email address, phone number, fax number and social media contact information on every page. • Increase traffic with keywords and links. Using the right words on your site helps search-engine spiders or robots to decide what your site is about and help rank higher in search listings. The “right” keywords are ones searchers would use to find you. Ask at least a dozen of your vendors and customers what words they would use if they were searching for your type of products and/or services. Work these words into the text on your site.
Links also help drive website traffic. Search engines will increase the ranking of your site when reputable sites link to yours. So ask your suppliers, customers and industry associations to add you as a hyperlink on their sites.
• Publicity also helps. The more press visibility your company gets, the more attention your site will receive from search engines.
• Emphasize mobile access. Towards the end of 2013 website searches on mobile devices surpassed those on desktops and traffic is increasing at 3.5 percent per month, according to Vocus, an Internet marketing blog. Forty percent of mobile-device users say they leave sites that are not mobile friendly and 46 percent say they are unlikely to return.
Google reports that website owners – even large organizations – are slow to adapt to mobile. So optimizing your site for mobile users right now can give you a leg up on your competition.
When thoughtfully constructed and optimized for mobile access, your website can be a powerful growth tool for your business. •


Bill Welch is president of Portsmouth-based Welch Inc. He can be reached at welchinc1@mac.com.

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