A website is a living document that represents your brand, your company, your vision, your products, really everything that encompasses your business. It is no longer just “nice” to have a website. It is a business necessity. Just think about how you view companies that do not have a well designed website. You disqualify them and at the very least you will not enter your credit card information on their site.

Having a junky website or a website that is hard to navigate is hurting your business. It is so easy with our current technology to create and manage a great looking website. Think about your sales teams, many of ours meet with clients face to face. They interact and discuss the needs of the client, present our cost structure and have fantastic interactions with our clients. The worst thing that can happen after they leave is the client pulls up our website and it disqualifies us in their minds. A poor website can and will hurt your business.

We prescribe to the notion that simplicity is always best. We want the client to be able to get around the website easy and be able to find the information they want quickly. There is a place to add content for users to read, but the way the organization of the website is done is key. Simplicity doesn’t mean you do not have content, it means the content is easy understood.

You want to create an experience on your website through design. Your clients will continue to order from you when they enjoy their experience. When we advise our clients we build their marketing strategy around user experience and return on investment. We are past the point of just driving traffic to their sites. We deliver value to the bottom line, we are are major function of the entire sales department.

How to Improve Your Website:

You should hire a professional. That statement may seem like a shameless plug for Markedemic services, but I am being completely honest. It makes us absolutely cringe to hear that companies hire unqualified website designers because they are taking a college or even worse a high school class on website design. You wouldn’t hire just anyone to run your sales teams or do your accounting, why would you ever consider your website design to someone without qualifications?

We as a business community are past the point that just throwing up any website is acceptable. Your website needs to be indexed correctly, needs well written content, needs to be organized, needs high quality pictures, needs to function correctly, needs to convert, needs to drive sales, needs to look professional and lastly needs to validate your business.

Improving your website brings creditability to your business. Yes, you can go at it alone. You can try and put a template together or even worse task an employee who has “time” to build a website. Resist the temptation to do your website cheap and hire a professional to create a plan and execute a powerful business tool.

How to Convert a Lead to a Sale on your Website:

You have a website up, you may even be doing some SEO or Social Marketing services to drive leads to your site, what next? You convert that lead to a sale. This is where your return on investment event happens.

The most important event that happens is once a lead finds your site they qualify it in they mind as a site they can trust to buy a product or service. We call this a bounce rate. Your bounce rate tells us that a lead hit your site and left almost immediately. From there the lead needs to find what they searched for easily and in a logical way. This is why “call to action” links and menus are critical. If your company offers a service and you want them to contact you, make the contact us section easy to use. If you want them to buy a product off the website, you make sure your store is easy to use. TIP OF THE DAY: do not force customers to create a profile to check out, let them check out as a guest. Yes, you want to market back to them by gathering information, but never forget their experience is more important.

 

How to Create Website Credibility:

  • This starts off with your homepage and the organization of the content. Review the following list of bullet points, not every business is the same and therefore you will have many more items that needs to be included on your website:
  • Your brand logo must be highlighted
  • All pictures need to be high quality
  • The site needs to look like it was professionally created
  • The website has to be responsive (this means is will function on a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer the same)
  • Clearly define the contact us section and have it linked to google maps
  • Create links to other credible websites
  • Do not have dead links or social media links that don’t connect
  • Have a blog section that is up to date and used frequently
  • Show the authors credentials
  • Product pictures need to have a zoom function 
  • The website needs to be index correctly for crawlers to read
  • Do not clutter the website with offers or discounts

There are many more specific details to consider and improve for your website but this is a list of some major factors. A general rule is that your website needs to have a logical flow for the content. If you have sections that don’t feel/look right, change them.

 

Conclusion

Your website can be your most effective tool to grow your business. The design of your website is very important to the user experience. Customers are the lifeblood of your business, make sure they know that. Lastly, implement an online marketing plan. Markedemic works with business owners to drive profit to the bottom line, let us do it for your company.