Your website is incredibly important. Even if you get all of your business from word of mouth referrals, bet your bottom dollar that referral is looking at your website first.
An outdated, neglected website is as bad for your business as showing up to a new client meeting in yoga pants and a t-shirt from last year’s Turkey Trot. You won’t be respected or taken seriously. You will look like a joke … no matter how brilliant you are or amazing your services are.
Half the battle is the first impression. Showing up to a meeting in a nicely tailored outfit automatically signifies you take yourself and your work seriously. Yes, business is more casual these days, but first impressions count.
Here are 5 quick questions you can ask yourself about your website … is your website nicely tailored or ready for a day of movies on the couch? Be honest …
1. Is My Website Design Fresh and Reflective of My Brand?
Maybe you don’t even have a specific “brand” at this point, and if you don’t, that’s definitely something you need to work on. But whether or not you have a brand, your website can still be professionally designed to reflect the quality of your business and it’s services … TODAY!
Does your website speak to people the way it should in 2015? … or does it look like it is from 1999. Or even 2010 really, because that’s still too outdated! Consumers are very savvy and expect clean, modern, and updated websites. How your website looks makes a difference to them and the majority of people feel like websites with good designs are more trustworthy. We, ourselves, have actually landed on a website and thought “Oh, this company must not be in business anymore” because of their extremely out-of-date website. If you’re putting forth the effort to make a good first impression on consumers through your website, then people will feel like they’re going to get that same great effort back through your company and it’s services.
Google some of your competitors in town and see if your website is more impressive. And … google some of the big name companies in your field and see if you website is providing the right information to stand up to the big dogs. Remember, you don’t have to be an Amazon or a national franchise to compete. As long as your site is up-to-date with thoughtful design and provides the best and most easy to access content, then you’re in the running! Many people may be looking for a small business that can offer them more personalized service, so use your website to show them your personality and your passion for what you do. They’ll remember that!
2. Is My Website Easy to Navigate?
What is the most common product or service you sell? Can your target consumer instantly get to the information they need to make that decision? Or do they have to click through a menu 3 or 4 times to find what they want? Ask a few really great customers if they find your website easy to use. Ask them to be as honest as possible. Ask them what they wish they could find more easily.
Now go to your Google Analytics. Click on Behavior and then Behavior Flow. This visual flow will show you exactly where your customers are clicking through on your website. My favorite thing to look at here is where is the most common place people click from my homepage. Are they using my navigation menu or are they using the big call to action at the top of my homepage? Where do they go next? Use this chart to gain insight into what your customers are looking for and how they are using your website.
3. Is My Content Relevant?
This piggy backs off of #2. If your content isn’t relevant it doesn’t matter how easy it is to get to what consumers are looking for … they will just have to keep looking for what they need! Again, ask a few really great customers if your website is a resource to them. If they tell you that your website isn’t a resource, think about what potential customers you are missing out on because your website doesn’t hook them!
If you haven’t updated your content in several months or years, take an hour tomorrow morning and find improvements on each page your can easily and quickly make. We know it is hard to run a a business and update content on the regular so try to make your content answer common questions so you don’t have to. Two birds with one stone, right?
4. Is My Website Mobile Responsive?
This is a big deal. If your website isn’t mobile responsive you will not be found in search results on mobile devices. Take a look around next time you are at lunch or in a store and see how many tops of heads you see … those are potential customers looking for solutions online from their phone and tablets.
Google has a really cool tool you can use to see if you are mobile responsive … https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ And we have a blog post all about the details of why this matters … How Will Google’s April 21st Search Changes Affect Your Business?
Now go to your Google Analytics again and see how much of your traffic comes from mobile devices? Click on Audience, Overview, Mobile, Overview. You will see right away how much traffic comes from each device. The telling number here is bounce rate. Bounce rate tells you how many people land on your website and click away without ever going to a second page or post. It is a single interaction with your website. If visitors open your website on a phone or tablet, do they stay on the website or click away because they can’t easily see your website? And how much time do they spend on your website on each device?
Here are our numbers …
Desktop … 45.82% off all traffic, 45.27% bounce rate, 3.95 pages per visit, 2.19 minutes spent on the website.
Tablet … 28.14% of all traffic, 50.75% bounce rate, 2.96 pages per visit, 1.45 minutes spent on the website.
Phone … 24.04% of all traffic, 58.15% bounce rate, 2.29 pages per visit, 1.11 minutes spent on the website.
So 52.18% off all of our website traffic comes from mobile devices. If we weren’t mobile responsive think how much higher our bounce rate would be and how much lower time spent on our website would be! And guess what we learn from the data we just shared with you? That we can take steps to improve the content on the popular pages so that people on mobile have an even better experience.
5. What is My Daily/Monthly Traffic? How Many Visitors Do I Need?
Traffic equals more consumers which equals more sales. There is not a realistic way to convert every single person that visits your website. We like to shoot for 1% conversion rate. Websites are a high dollar purchase and take a lot of decision making time leading up to the purchase so we set our conversion rate really low. We guess about 1% of the people that look at our website will pick us. Lets say we want 10 new projects each month. That means we need 1000 people to look at our website to reach our goal.
To grow our website traffic we need to blog on the regular to attract new visitors, have more opportunity to be found in search, and to build trust faster. But before we blog more, we need to know where we are starting from. The same goes for you. How many visitors are you getting each month? Go to Google Analytics, Audience, Overview. How many Users came to your site in one month? If we see a number under 1000 visitors we worry. If we see a number way higher than that but don’t have the incoming projects then we know something is off in our content.
In Closing
Be honest with yourself about the time, effort and resources you dedicate to your website. Take 10 minutes and answer these 5 questions about your website.
Shoot us a quick email and let us know what else you would like to learn about improving your website or online marketing in general. Don’t be afraid to ask us questions specifically about your business. We are always here to help and want to make sure our next blog post answers the questions that matter most to you!
P.S. There may be a few new website courses coming your way. Make sure your questions are answered in the course by emailing us anything you want to know more about!
P.S.S. See what we just did here? We answered a few common questions in a blog post … we show off our smarts, help you learn more about your website and search and gain your trust. You can do the same thing when creating content!