In this day and age, it is pretty much impossible to run a business without having a digital presence. But your website must represent more than just a warm body. Your website needs to be optimized, functional, and engaging if you want to attract customers.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of websites that miss the mark entirely regarding design, usability, and content. But fortunately, this problem can be fixed.
BrickStreet Marketing offers a free 10-point checklist where we will go through your site and analyze the essential areas that need to be addressed. Here are some crucial points to remember so you can capitalize on opportunities to attract new business.
- Messaging and Call to Actions. Does your website quickly convey what your company does? Do you have high-impact buttons that say READ MORE, BUY NOW, CLICK HERE, etc., to get people to act? If you do, have these CTA’s been tested that they are all going to the right place?
- Responsiveness. From wide desktop displays to mobile devices. It is important to make sure the site renders a usable site on all devices that can be easily accessed. Google will penalize sites for not being mobile friendly.
- Usability. Basic usability is achieved through effective navigation, typeface readability, color contrasts, and web standards. Making sure images have alt and title tags will not only get you Google points, but it will also help visually impaired users.
- Contact Information. Accessibility is everything with contact information. You should always have a phone number and voicemail, even if you don’t have dedicated staff to answer the phone. An email address should also be linked to in the header and the footer. And sites with a live-chat feature convert much higher than sites that do not offer this feature.
- Search Engine Optimization. This item is worthy of its own checklist, but for basic analysis, make sure the site has the appropriate Title, Description, and header tags. It should be optimized from both browsers and humans. It needs to be compelling and readable and easy to determine what your page is about, so it can be determined where you should rank in search engine placements (SERPs). Also, think about what search terms people would use to find you. Are you in the Top 3 in Google for those terms? Contact your web specialist if you are concerned about your web rankings. It might be well worth investing in an active SEO program to increase customer lead generation.
- Presence of Analytic Data. If site traffic is not being tracked, it can be hard to tell how the website is performing. Or what are the most viewed pages, and if so, why? Knowing this information can give you insight into developing more content-relevant pages.
- Social Integration. Never miss an opportunity to leverage the power of social media. Integrate all relevant social media platforms within your design. Fast access to social media pages instantly broadens a brand’s reach and helps increase visibility and traffic.
- Overall Design. Your website should be visually appealing. The site needs to have enough information to communicate, but not so much that it is overwhelming or confusing. Sites that look good and are modern have a higher conversion rate.
- Render Speed\Page Load. Time. Nobody wants to wait (yawn) for a slow-loading website. How fast each page loads are directly related to bounce rate and search engine placement (SERP). Google will penalize sites at around 3+ seconds. Caching, reducing image sizes and removing items that have a weight greater than their overall value will speed up load times.
- Content Analysis. Does your website have content worthy of linking to? Is there a great product or service that contains information on a product that no one else has?
