Make Your Site More Effective for Your Business
Every business wants a successful website. Every successful website draws people in, encourages contact and generates leads. In other words, every website is a potential source of new customers, an opportunity for you to make your pitch and a chance to educate your customers.
A poor website isn’t just a missed opportunity, it actually can hurt your business, since potential customers can click away to find your competition. Don’t let that happen to you. A great website is another tool in your marketing toolbox. It’s one more way to connect to your target audience.
Ray Access, with experience researching and crafting highly effective websites, has put together a list of five ways you can improve your website. And these are things you can do as soon as today.
1. Assess Your Website
To improve your website, you first have to know what works and what doesn’t. That’s just common sense. To move forward, you first have to know where you are. You can hire consultants to come in to do a months-long study of your site. They’ll track page hits and how long visitors spend on each page. It will likely cost you thousands of dollars to point out things you may already know, or at least suspect.
Or you can hire Ray Access to do a website assessment. An assessment is a page-by-page review of your site from a visitor’s point of view. In other words, it inspects the user experience (UX) of your site. The report includes design, content, usability, navigation and presentation. What works? What’s missing? What can make it better? It’s all in a website assessment.
2. Upgrade the Technology
According to Forbes Magazine, your site needs to be fast, safe and mobile-friendly. All three factors are vitally important to ranking your website high and providing a positive user experience. You may need help accomplishing these goals, but they will make a difference in how your site is perceived.
Since the internet is all technology, improve your website by upgrading the technology. To the point:
- Speed helps your website load faster. Making anyone wait for your site to load is essentially putting up a wall between your site and your visitors. Speeding up your site encourages visitors to stay.
- Safety has become a primary issue, especially if you’re taking credit card or other personal information. At the very least, your site should have secure sockets layer (SSL) enabled.
- Mobile-friendly sites don’t just render more seamlessly on smaller connected devices, but they rank better in Google searches. Don’t fall behind the curve; improve your website by making sure it’s mobile-friendly.
3. Add Testimonials
With the advent of pay-per-click campaigns, there have been many studies on what makes a successful landing page — the page the ad sends you to. It doesn’t have to be your home page. In fact, it’s better if it’s a targeted page made especially for that ad. And one of the most successful components of good landing pages is “social proof.”
Social proof is basically testimonials on the page from previous customers. But they must be believable, and the best way to ensure believability is to put a real name, a real quote and a real photo of your customers on your website. Visitors like to see that others have used your products or services to do what they need. It’s a powerful tool to improve your website’s marketing power.
4. Start a Blog
A blog gives you a weekly opportunity to educate your customers and potential customers about your industry, your business, about you or about almost anything that relates. You can even tap into current events as a way to lure visitors to your site. Your blog is a marketing tool to capture more views and more viewers.
A blog also has the advantage of adding volume to your website. More and more articles related to what you do, how you do it and why you’re the best add up to more persuasive content for creating leads and generating more business. And the content in your blog posts can be reused a number of ways:
- In advertisements
- In newsletters
- In marketing collateral
- In press releases
5. Update Your Messaging
Regardless what kind of search engine optimization (SEO) you’re running — or the volume of social media campaigns, every interaction with your audience should encourage them to click through to your website. It’s your website’s job to convert visitors into customers. It’s up to your website messaging to win over new fans.
If your site is getting lots of traffic, but few sales, improve your website by changing your messaging. Maybe you need more persuasive content. Maybe you should revise your pitch. Maybe the language on your site doesn’t connect with your potential customers. Maybe you need more calls to action to give your visitors a direction. Whatever you need, call on Ray Access to deliver expert content for you.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
