Your website is your ‘marketing hub’. All of your digital marketing should connect to it and flow through it. Here are 7 ways to make your website more effective:
1. Decide what your website is there for. Some websites don’t have a clear purpose. Yours should. Is it primarily about awareness, sales leads or online sales, for example? Don’t try to please everyone. Have a clear focus for your site.
2. Learn how to use your Content Management System. A CMS such as WordPress, enables you to have full control over your own website. Learn how to use it properly.
3. It must look professional. There is nothing worse than a poorly designed site, where the colours clash and nothing lines up. It must look good at first glance (by which I mean within 1 second).
4. The content must be professional. Your content must read well and have perfect grammar, punctuation and spelling. If it reads well, no one will notice as they will be concentrating on the messages and what you have to sell, not tripping over badly written webcopy.
5. It has to work well technically. Does it look great on a desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone?
6. Google loves a blogger. Everyone knows this so the question is, how often do you blog?
7. Measure your results. You may well have Google Analytics (or another stats package) installed on your site. If you do, how often do you review this information?
Nigel Temple offers a website review service.
There is a Websites group within The Marketing Compass website where you can ask questions.
Follow Nigel on Twitter: https://twitter.com/nigeltemple
Good advice Nigel.
One good way to check your content is to type it into Word ( or other wordprocessing package first. Three benefits. Firstly you can check the spelling and grammar. Secondly, you can play around with the keywords (I now write mine at the bottom of the page). Finally, you’ve got a copy if the worst happens and you forget to save the page or lose it!
Thank you Jacqui – very helpful!
Great post Nigel – I spend almost as much time tweaking my website and adding content to it as I do searching for new clients.
The first thing I’m asked when I speak to potential new clients is do I have a website? Hopefully my website will give them an immediate feeling of the professional nature of my work and will encourage them to read further into the services I offer.
Good work with the daily blogging! Is there any way I can get your daily blog posts by email?
Thank you, David – I will find a way of adding ’email your blogs to me’!