Sometimes, in business, the biggest missed opportunities are the ones you don’t think about.
That’s even more true today, in the Internet age. It’s so common to do the work in setting up a commercial website, outfitting it with what you think is right, and then just letting that key infrastructure drift over time.
A good online presence takes work, and some amount of maintenance. That’s what gives you the best chance of capturing all of those valuable leads that boost your business.
Why? Because a website is a complex organism. All of the parts have to work well to make up a unified whole. The outreach should be fresh, regularly updated, and relatable to be effective. The site should be easy to navigate. You want visitors to feel that they’re well served by what they find there. That doesn’t just happen by accident.
What about a website that benefits from some improvement? What does that look like? Here are five things that we look for to make sure that our clients’ websites are working to their full potential.
Improving Site Function
In some cases, your site may load too slowly, leading to visitors bouncing out. Also, you may not have the best setup for mobile platforms. Why is this an issue? So many people are doing business on their phones that what the pros call “responsive design” is a crucial investment.
When the screen doesn’t resize, the controls are lost, and users find the site difficult to navigate on that small screen, there’s an opportunity to help and make it easier for your customers. And that value, that return on investment, will come back to you.
Creating Clear Value Propositions and CTAs
Just like in face-to-face marketing, your site’s value proposition needs to be front and center. Visitors have to know, at a glance, what you offer, and why. Why they should be interested, that is.
Think about the elevator pitch that you give to people at events, on the street, and yes, on elevators. That has to be present online, too, and it has to be clear and prominent.
In addition to grabbing people’s attention up front, content pages that you use for outreach should have something called a “CTA,” or call to action, near the end. This again highlights that value proposition: what your business does, why it does it well, and why people should care.
Building Conversion Insights
The simple way to explain this is that your site should not only bring people in, but also show you why it’s effective. Conversion tracking means you know how people are moving through your site, what is the vehicle of attaching them to engagement with your business, and, essentially, why they buy.
Check our glossary for terms like A/B testing that explain more about how this works.
Adding Quality Content
As a visitor to a website, if you’re reading through a landing page, an information page, a product page or anything else, and you see missing punctuation, broken sentences, misspelled words and unclear ideas, what comes to mind?
These issues can leave visitors less confident about what they are reading and influence their interactions with your business online.
By contrast, when you have excellent, clean, crisp copy, along with clear and compelling arguments, you’re likely to keep the reader’s attention as they continue to ponder: does this business have something that I need or want?
You have a chance to make those elevator pitches work for you. You have a chance at conversion.
Getting the Right Traffic
This leads to our last point: you might have traffic, but if it’s not the right traffic, you have an opportunity to improve, to make things clearer and get more attention from your intended audience.
That might mean that you see a high “bounce rate,” with people entering the site only to leave early. It might mean that people show you, with questions or comments, that they are not part of your intended audience, but because of the way the site is set up, they’re coming to you anyway.
These are additional warning signs that your site needs to change.
What Can You Do?
WebSubstance provides a website audit, an evaluation that can show you what’s good, what’s missing and what could be better.
Give your site a makeover and enjoy the benefits: better traffic, a more engaged customer base, and better conversion.
Contact us for a technical audit today.
