A law office we support has an old, outdated, poorly written website that bounces 99% of its visitors and generated $0 in revenue last year.
Another one of our clients says his website is “working just fine.”
To my faithful readers that I have built trust with, I’m sorry, because I just lied to you– I didn’t actually ask another client about his website… I asked the same client.
When I ask business owners about their websites, most often I find they haven’t thought about how their website should (or could) be working. They usually say, “Billy handles the website, I stay out of it!”
Is just “existing” enough? The lawyer I spoke of earlier would check to make sure his website was online every morning, and to him, that meant it was working. This is like flipping through a yellow pages book to find your phone number and saying, “Yep, it’s there!”
My two cents: Your website should sell. No matter what your business does, if you can’t connect the dots from a sale back to your website, your website isn’t working.
There are really three areas to address when getting your website working: Getting Them There, Keeping Them There, Getting Them to Buy.
Getting “Them” There
One key item that I’m skipping over: You need to know who “Them” is. This is Marketing 101: Know Your Target. In order to prevent writing a book instead of an article, I must assume you all know who “Them” is. In this case, I will use “Them” to mean your specific target market.
Two ways your targets find your website: Organic Search or PPC. PPC is paying for clicks, like Google Adwords or Banner ads. Basically, the more you pay the more visitors. Increasing Organic Traffic (free clicks) is what we are going to focus on today.
Getting your website to naturally show up in Google searches has to do with:
- Code: Was your site built with sloppy programming code?
- Freshness: How recently were your pages created or updated?
- Relevance: Can the search engine relate your site to what was searched for?
- Links: How many other sites link back to your content?
- Crawl-able: Can the Google Robots easily navigate your site and grab bits of content?
We will get more in-depth with some of these topics in the next section.
Keeping “Them” There
So they clicked a link to your site. Maybe you paid for the click, maybe it was organic, but the question is, what now? If they leave without navigating to another page, that is called a “bounce”.
Ways to keep your precious visitors from bouncing:
- Relevant Content: Does what they see immediately reflect what they were expecting?
- Easy to Navigate: Can they quickly find the answer to whatever they are looking for?
- Good Content: Sure it’s relevant, but is your content worth reading? This is your chance to be the expert they are looking for.
- Recent Updates: Was your last blog posted in ’99?
- Visually Appealing: Does your website look hokey or rinky-dink?
Getting “Them” to Buy
Here’s the tricky part. If you have a great product that people want to buy, the hard part is done. Now, all you have to do is:
- Clear Message: Can they tell exactly what you sell and why they need it within 5 seconds?
- Present An Offer: Something to get them to pull the trigger. Tell them exactly what they should do and how quickly they need to do it.
- Direct Response: Have direct response forms on your pages. Remove all road blocks and make it as easy as possible for them to contact you. Once they submit, it’s on you to close the sale!
- Easy Buying Portal: If you accept credit cards and sell directly off your website, make sure your portal works well. They should be able to search and buy easily (and securely). Any speed bumps along the way may send them to your competitors!
Now you have the general framework for a website that works. So the question is; Does yours work? Submit to the right to schedule a free Website consultation.
~Bruce
