Eight quick tips to make the most of your website.

Remember the days when even having a website made you cutting edge? Times have changed. While yesterday’s websites resemble little more than online brochures, today’s websites are content hubs of information that use analytics to guide everything from user experience to inbound and content-driven marketing strategy.

Or at least, they should. 

Most small business owners are too busy putting out fires to attend to their site on a regular basis. This leads to websites with poor user experience (UX) that don’t do their part in moving would-be customers down the sales funnel. What can you do to change that? Use the quick tutorial below as a starting point for dusting off your site. Then schedule quarterly site updates to continue the progress. 

Nine Quick Tips to Make the Most of Your Website

1. Make sure your company’s contact info
   (phone/address) is easy to find.

   Generally this means the info is found on the “contact us” page as well as your home page and at the bottom of every page. 

2. Check for broken links.

   You may have linked to a product or article in the past that now delivers the dreaded “404” error message when clicked. Few things are as frustrating to customers as encountering dead links on your site. Fix them. 

3. Provide regular updates.

   We’ve all been to a website where the most recent blog post is dated 2012 and the events page lists the upcoming Thanksgiving blowout sale – from two years ago. If you don’t care enough to provide current information, what reason will customers have for staying on your site?

4. Cut down on the clutter.

   Your website may be filled with relevant, interesting information that consumers can’t find, thanks to all the non-relevant, miscellaneous content clutter surrounding it. 

5. Employ analytics.

   You wouldn’t build a house without checking to make sure measurements were correct and everything was in alignment. Websites require the same attention. Google Analytics helps paint a picture of how people find you and how they move around your site, allowing you to offer more of the types of content people are finding useful. If you’re new to Google Analytics, tutorials about how to use various aspects are available for free through their online Analytics Academy.

6. Hunt down orphan pages.

   An orphan page is any page on your site that doesn’t readily link back to your home page and/or is unclear to the user where they should go next. Suppose someone forwards a product description posted on your site to a friend, but the link doesn’t lead the recipient to your home page or a “Learn more” or “Buy now!” page. You may have just lost a potential sale. At the very least, put your logo on the top of every page as a link to your home page. 

7. Consider the user experience.

   User experience (or “UX” in the digital world) is all about creating a pleasing experience for customers navigating your site. Much of what we’ve discussed already – orphan pages, dead links, buried information – makes for an unpleasant UX. But more than that, you want a site that’s easy to navigate. Try this: Ask a couple of people unfamiliar with your site to visit and look up a certain topic or product. Observe them as they go about their task, but don’t interfere. It can be an eye-opening experience to realize that your site isn’t as intuitive as you think it is.

8. Link to your social network sites.

   When used correctly, social media can help market your business/brand and transform customers into brand ambassadors. Make sure your social media links (for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) are available on every page of your site.  

9. Have your site seen as credible.

   Sites that are seen as credible generally have the following traits in common: They’re accurate, current, objective and written for a clearly defined audience. Small things (that aren’t so small) make a difference. Check your site for everything from spelling and grammar to making sure the site is pleasing to the eye with an easy-to-read font. Post appropriately sized and engaging images, and make sure there’s not too long a scroll to get through a page.

If you haven’t dusted your site off in some time, don’t get discouraged and feel like you need to fix everything at once. Attacking, in small chunks, what needs to be done will move you ever closer to your goal of a robust, interactive and relevant site.

Keep Grilling,
Rob