by Mark Bloom | Sep 19, 2016 | Website Content
Revise Your Business Site to Improve Sales
September brings change. The kids go back to school. The long summer days cool to brisk autumn nights. If you’re anything like the writers at Ray Access, you get energized when fall returns every year. You may be past school age, but you still feel the charge in the air. It makes you want to start a new project, complete an old project and generally get caught up.
So tackle something that helps your business. The fall season is the perfect time to review your company website. The holiday rush is still months away. Your fourth quarter marketing plans will get a boost from a revamped website. And your business will charge into the New Year with renewed momentum.
Why You Need to Review Your Company Website
Website design is a lot like automobile design. You may not notice big changes year-to-year, but by the end of the decade, you can definitely pick out the 10-year-old car, and not just because of the accumulated dents. Website design changes happen even more frequently than automobile design. As a result, your five-year-old website might look like it was designed by someone driving an Edsel.
The design of your website makes a first impression on your visitors. An outdated design says, “I’m excited to have a website, and it’s only 2002!” If you don’t keep your website current, potential customers might think you don’t keep your company up-to-date. When no one wants to buy last year’s model, your website visitors may disappear with a click.
Look Beyond the Design
In addition to your website design, review your company website content. In fact, even if your design is still current, you should reread the content that graces your website pages. Is it effective? Has it generated leads and contacts? Ideally, that’s what your business website is supposed to do.
Yes, that’s what Ray Access does — provide website content and blog posts. But whether you hire a professional writer or do it in-house, you want your website to work for you, don’t you? You want an active site that:
- Engages your visitors
- Connects with potential customers
- Builds trust in your company
- Establishes your authority in your field
- Answers common questions
- Persuades visitors to contact you
- Turns visitors into loyal customers
If your website doesn’t accomplish these goals, than it’s a money pit rather than a moneymaker. In the world of online marketing for business, everything you do needs to pay for itself. Every ad campaign, every design change and every website investment has to have an ROI that makes it worthwhile. And no other investment pays off more than new content that reaches your audience.
Start Today
So review your company website. See it from an objective point of view. And then take action if it falls short of expectations. If you need help, Ray Access offers a service called a website assessment that reviews your website, page by page, from a visitor’s point-of-view experience. The experts at Ray Access can tell you what works on your site, what doesn’t work, and what opportunities you’re missing. Contact us today for your website assessment!
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.
by Mark Bloom | Jun 2, 2015 | Website Content
Why Ray Access Provides Website Assessments
Our website assessment gives your site a human evaluation.
Website analytics (like Google Analytics) can show you all kinds of data:
- How many unique visits your website attracts.
- How long they stay on your site.
- What pages they visit.
- Where they came from or how they got there.
All this is really useful information, if you know how to decipher it and act upon it. To the content experts at Ray Access, however, there are two very simple computations that are meaningful:
- Are you attracting enough visitors to your website, and
- Are you converting those visitors into customers?
In plain language, is your website successful at bringing in new and repeat business? Is it working for you? If it is, you don’t need analytics to tell you; you can see it in your bottom line. If your website isn’t working, analytics may not tell you what’s wrong.
What’s Wrong with Your Website
No disrespect to analytics and those professionals who rely on the data they generate. Those numbers are real, they’re valid and they do reflect success or failure. But customer conversion is a subtle art. If it were simply a matter of numbers, every online venture would eventually succeed, given the plethora of search engine optimization (SEO) specialists out there.
Unfortunately, conversion relies on multiple factors, including the mood of the visitor when he reaches your website. Little things can erode his curiosity, his confidence and his desire to buy. For example:
- Readers who see spelling or grammatical errors on your website lose faith in your credibility.
- Visitors often give up after a few seconds if they don’t see what they need right away.
- Your website content may actually say one thing when you meant another, causing visitor confusion and lost sales.
- Poorly designed sites are notorious for pushing away visitors. If your website content is not easy to scan, your website’s not easy to use.
- Website designs that look antiquated do not elicit feelings of confidence in visitors.
- Big blocks of text turn readers off.
- A bad experience, like a bad review, is impossible to delete. Once your reputation is tarnished, you can’t easily win back your audience.
Pet Peeves of Real People
While responding to analytics can show you where your website issues lie, you can master the SEO requirements for the pages of your website and still not be able to convert the visitors you’re drawing. The problem could be that you’re so immersed in keyword research that you’ve forgotten that it’s real people who actually visit your site. Real consumers rely on those search engines to bring them the goods, services and information they seek. So you must direct your website content to answer real questions from those real human visitors.
One of the worst mistakes web developers make is to rely on cool graphics, hyped up verbiage and trendy videos. As a result, a first-time visitor to your site sees so much flash that by the time he finishes viewing all these distractions on your home page, he still doesn’t even know what your company does, what it sells or why it even has a website (other than to show off its trendiness).
Business owners often rely too heavily on website designers to create a site, and then don’t take the time to go over that site to ensure that it works for their target market. What ends up happening is you get a great-looking site that doesn’t actually work to convert visitors. And if you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it.
Another common flaw in website design is that the contact information is difficult to find. Putting it in small fonts at the bottom of your page is insulting to a visitor who may just need a phone number or email address to ask a question or make a purchase. Your contact information — an email address, phone number, physical address, hours of operation… whatever it is — may be the most important thing on your website.
Website Assessments to the Rescue
We started Ray Access because of our own experiences and frustrations with website design and poor content quality. Here was a niche we knew we could fill. But at the beginning, we just offered to write website content and blog posts. Soon after, we launched a service we hadn’t even considered at the beginning: website assessments. For every new client, we offered to review the existing website and point out problems, errors and opportunities. Then we provided ideas, options and solutions.
It turns out that website assessments held enormous value in and of themselves. So it became a standalone service. An affordable, no-obligation website assessment provides a snapshot of how effective your current website is from a content perspective. In other words, we examine your website as a first-time visitor might see it. We generate a page-by-page report that tells you what works, what doesn’t work, and even what’s missing.
Why Content Providers?
Whether you are creating a new website or updating a current site, bring in an experienced team of website professionals to provide an outsider’s view of your content and design. While we’re not website designers or SEO pros here at Ray Access, we have visited thousands of websites and we are experts in content. We know what works.
We review your content to determine if it builds trust and answers questions. We check your design to see if it’s clear and east to navigate. We look at your graphical elements to find out if they add value or just get in the way. And since our website assessments come with no obligation, you can turn around and hire someone else to fix your problems. Adding value is our goal. Getting more business from you does not motivate us; earning your trust does.
It’s the Details that Count
A professional website assessment from Ray Access gives you:
- An overall critique of your site, including how it looks and how it reads
- In-depth line reading for grammar, spelling and context appropriateness
- Review for clarity
- Advice for where to place call-to-action elements
- A check of all active links (you’d be surprised how many web pages are filled with broken links)
- Questions that your customers may have that can’t be found easily on your site, if at all
- Suggestions for additional pages
- How well and how easy your website is to navigate (or not)
- Critique of the photos and taglines
- SEO options, such as keyword optimization
- An honest appraisal of how a new visitor sees your site
With each new website assessment we do, we find areas that are confusing or conflicting that we never encountered before. Because your business is unique, your website should reflect it. You can find hundreds of really cool design templates out there. Many businesses try to stand out by relying on slang and non-business verbiage. That’s great. Have fun building your site.
But don’t trade trendiness for clarity. And don’t trade flash for conversions. The bottom line is that your website should be adding to your bottom line. If it’s not, contact Ray Access for a website assessment. We’ll find the real world answers 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.
