The Florida Web Blog
Better Website is Better Business for you
Many clients are coming to our company, dissatisfied with their website’s results or under a bad user review. They know their websites can be doing better, but they’re just not sure how.
With more than 18 years of launching and re-launching websites, we have developed many affordable and proven ways to enhance and increase the performance of the sites we work on.
But first, let us define what we mean a better website.
When doing business online, better website - except the results - means:
- Increased conversions
- Accurate and high placement in Google search and other search engines results
- A serious amount of repeat visits and customer retention
- Ultimately greater sales and brand exposure
So, how do you go about having a good website?
1. Effective Landing Pages
A landing page is a page designed to receive the traffic generated by a specific marketing campaign. The job of a landing page is to convert that traffic into actions, such as a phone call, sign up, download or a purchase and of course only with a landing page you can count exactly the results of a specific campaign.
Usually, the most effective landing page is not your homepage, but a far more targeted page focusing on a single message.
Provide value added content
The web has done an amazing job of empowering consumers. Online, brands no longer have the luxury of delivering a one-way marketing message. To message effectively on the web it is critical that you provide information that serves the needs of your target audience.
For example, if you are selling a photography service, provide value added content educating the visitor on the features, your expertise, when and how and price. If you can, it is even more effective to add a brief youtube video of your services than just some text and a price.
When clients receive more useful information on a product or service, they are more likely to buy. This is the kind of information that increase your branding, builds trust and makes people want to do business with you.
2. Improving Your Message
Visitors to any website have less than 3'' seconds to stay in the website. To capture the visitors and turn them into customers or clients, you need to deliver your company’s central messages clearly, quickly, accurate and convincingly.
This can be accomplished by keeping your message simple with clean graphic design and not overwhelming your visitors with massive blocks of text.
A great example of this is the Zappos.com homepage. This website uses large and clear fonts, keep the copy to a minimum and provide clear paths to the appropriate internal pages (“Dresses for all Occasions” “New Arrivals,” “Boots,” etc.).
3. Give Your Visitors a Reason to Come Back
There are more than three billions of people surfing the Internet. It takes work, marketing and creativity just to get them to visit your website for the first time. Once you are fortunate enough to be on a visitor’s radar, then it is critical to keep them coming back to your site again and again. Why? Because it's the only way this visitor to become over time your client or customer.
The key to getting repeat visitors is to give them compelling reasons to return. Some of things we've seen on successful sites include:
- Practical articles and content that provides information of real use to your visitors
- An updated blog
- Opportunities like comments or reviews for user-generated content
- Sign up to newsletter and/or RSS feeds and make sure its informative
- Practical “how to” advice
4. Make a Good Use of Social Media
A lot of companies and small businesses have finally understood the fact that needs to be involved all the way to social media. Unfortunately, very few of them have a clue as how to use social media effectively on their websites.
Just putting a bunch of icons like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn on the top of your website is good for sure, but is mostly ineffective as the vast majority of users don’t click on them. So how do you use social media as a business-generating tool?
TWE knows how to provide great content and push visitors will email it to a friend, Tweet about it and even “like” that content and share it on Facebook. By having your visitors do the marketing for your business, you have created a path to a much larger audience with almost no limits for expansion.
5. Measure and Monitor Your Results
This final point is the most important. When new clients come to our company, I always ask them about how their website is doing.
What kind of traffic are you getting? Where is it coming from? What is your conversion rate? What is your bounce rate (the percentage of visitors that see your homepage and leave before going anywhere else on your site)? How much time are they spending on your site? What is the last page they visit before leaving your site?
Amazingly, the 90% have no clue as to how to answer these questions or to even understand what these questions mean. The same people, if they have a store, can tell you exactly how many people comes to their store every day, how many products they sell and how many just walk out without buying anything. Can also tell you what are their internal problems, what needs changes, and how the word-by-mouth advertising is helping their business.
When you fail to monitor the behavior of the visitors to your website, you miss a huge opportunity to make the same kinds of adjustments that will enhance your business. If 80% of the people coming to your homepage and leaves immediately without looking at any other page on your site, then you have serious problems and improvements are needed immediately.
Same goes for the checkout progress in your ecommerce system. If people are trying to buy products on your site but abandon their purchases during the checkout period, it needs fix.
Your website can be and should be your greatest marketing and sales tool. By following some basic principles, you can greatly increase the performance of your website. The Web Design & Development team, the Web Marketing and Analysts team, the S.E.O. experts at The Florida Web can help you embed these principles as we did on our clients’ websites and marketing campaigns.
If you are looking to improve the your business’s website, we would be happy to hear from. Please give us a call at 718 717 2867 and let us create your vision.
About the author
TWE's Support Team is a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and life experiences.