By BILL WELCH
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 marketing tool.
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. If you serve multiple segments, prioritize them in terms of the growth potential for your business. Then you can concentrate on the one(s) that will give you the best return.
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. Long, rambling homepages turn prospects off. Most often the fewer the words, the stronger the message.
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.
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 typefaces that are easy to read on computer and mobile screens, especially if your market is over 35. For the most part, you get your message across in the text and you don”™t want to do anything that gets in the way of readability.
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 a 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 ”” have been slow to adapt to mobile. 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 Welch Inc., a marketing communications firm he founded in 1977. He is a regular contributor to the FCBJ and can be reached at WelchInc1@mac.com.
