Building a website today is nothing like it used to be. With all of the competition on the internet, there is much more to building a website than just having a pretty site. First of all, if you are a business owner, your website should be built to convert visitors into customers. If your site doesn’t do this, you are losing a huge share of the market for your industry. Aside from that, there are a few mistakes we see on websites that are easily remedied.
Everyday, over 90 million people are searching the web to find products and services. If your site isn’t following these standard methods for a good site, you lose.
- Call to Action: You should, on EVERY page, have calls to action. What do I mean by that? I mean you should have click to call buttons everywhere on your site making it easier for visitors to contact you. If your phone number appears on your site it should be click to call so that mobile users (remember the 90 Million) can easily get in touch with you for your products or services. In addition, you should also, especially if you are a service based business, have contact or quote forms on every page for the same reason as the click to call button. Don’t make your potential customer have to hunt down how to get a hold of you. Make it visible on EVERY PAGE!!!!
- CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT!!!! Most websites have no content on them. Search engines have artificial intelligence that is good enough to read and understand what your page is about. However, if you do not have enough authoritative content, the AI cannot see what your page is about enough to know where to place your site in the search engine results when someone does a search for your products or services. We often here: “Well i don’t want my site to be too wordy”! Well then enjoy being on page two or worse and never getting any calls, because your competiton that does their website correctly wil blow you out of the water and take your customers because they were found on page one. The content is not just for your customers. It builds trust with search engines to show that you are an authority on your subject matter, which in this case, is your business niche. A good, converting front page, should have no less than 1500 words of content on the front page because that is the cornerstone page of your entire website and what search engines will see first.
- Don’t stop with just a front page. In relation to the above paragraph about content, if you offer various services in your niche, say for example, home remodeling, then you know that home remodeling covers a massive array of subjects like, kitchens, bath, room additions, cabinetry, countertops , etc. Each one of these topics should have theri own page with at least 750 words describing in detail your expertise on the subject. This adds trust to your site again as an authority on the subject.
- Site Images: THE biggest mistake 99.999999% of people who build out a website today just add an image to their site and move on. STOP THAT! First and foremost, all images on your website should be renamed with keywords related to your business to aid in ranking. Secondly, size matters. If you have a ton of large images (and by large I mean image file size, not dimensionally) it will slow your site down making it take a lot more time to load and that is not good. Websites need to load very quickly and not keep the customer waiting. We see client sites that are huge photo albums. HINT: No one cares about your pictures! People don’t go to your website to view photos of your work unless you are an artist or a photographer. Think about who your ideal customer is and cater to their needs. Keep your image file sizes small and use them throughout your website to break up the monotony of a lot of text.
- Email address on website: This is another common mistake we see. Unfortunately we live in a world that has web trolls. Web trolls are those who search the web with software looking for email addresses to spam and sell junk or worse. When you post up your email on your website, you are only inviting this menace to your inbox. We suggest instead to have forms that hide your email address but still allow you to receive messages or requests for quote from your websitye to your inbox in a much more secure manner.
- Overall Site Design: The next issue we want to address is your website structure. So many websites online today might as well have been made in crayon, because that’s how they look. Outdated, old design, not conversion quality and information everywhere that doesn’t direct the visitor to a specific task or action. It is not hard to discover a bad website design vs a good one. If little Johnny down the street just got a PC and you paid him $100 to build you a website, it’s going to look like a $100 website. Websites are, for lack of a better term, and artform. They have a structure that must be followed in order to work for you and not against you. What we mean by that is your website should be ranking well in the search engines, attract customers, load quickly, give visitors the information they need to make a decision to contac you and most of all, make you money!
- Social Media: This topic seems to scare a lot of people. Let us take the fear out of the equation. Social media, whether you like it or not is here to stay. Hundreds of millions of people are on some form or multiple forms of social media everyday. Whether it is to keep in touch with friends and famil or searching for new products and services. Get over it and start using it. With so many people using social media a day and most of it being free to use, why would anyone choose to NOT have as many properties to leverage their business reach utilizing social media? If your potential customers are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc, YOU SHOULD BE TOO! At the very least have a page describing your business and services. Let’s take the most common social media platform today, Facebook. Facebook is a very underrated and under valued source to advertise on. When an ad is set up correctly, you could easily reach tens of thousands or millions of people a day for very little money spent. Most businesses could spend as little as $30 a day and be receiving leads to thier business from interested customers seeking you out. Why would you just let that money float out of your hand and into the hands of your competitor? Are you in business to succeed and scale up or just stay average and in the middle? This is a question you have to ask yourself. USE social media as much as you can and get your brand out there.
- Marketing and Advertising: This is another big one. We see ads on google everyday and laugh at the way they were written or that they show up in a search that has ZERO to do with what we were searching for to begin with. With ads like Google Adwords, your ignorance can really screw you in the end. Ads need to be optimized for maximum performance and maximum ROI. If done incorrectly, only your business and your wallet suffer. If you do not understand how to set up ads, then hire a company like ours to handle that for you. THIS IS WHAT WE DO! We see company websites that are marketing with companies that are not even in the actual digital marketing business and it shows because the customer pays a ton of money for no results. We see it everyday and have heard it from the business owners that we have saved from that black hole of wasted money.
- Videos: Having multiple videos on Youtube, which is similar to social media presence is important. It is yet another FREE tool that you can use to advertise your company online and for free!!! A proper video that is optimized and has the correct headlines and descriptions will rank on Google and will increase your presence online as a whole. They are not hard to do, but crucial to your success online in the current day and age.
- Google Products: We mention google a lot in this post because, let’s face it, they are THE leading search engine in the world hands down! No one gives a crap about Bing, Yahoo and the other multitude of search engines out there. Google is everywhere, USE IT! If nothing else you NEED to have a Google My business page. This gets you listed in that map pack you see when you do a search on google. If you can get your website listed there, you win, BIG TIME! Other products from them include Google +, Google analytics, Search Console and so on. Either way, you need to be on these platforms for your business to succeed today.
We hope this article was informative and opened your eyes to the things you need to pay attention to in order to improve your website.
