Updated: Oct 4
Your website reflects your brand. Neglecting your website will send a signal that you are lazy, maybe not the impression you want to make.
If your company is doing a lot of good stuff and the website isn’t right, this is sending out a confusing message to your target market and the site will never rank for the keywords you want to be ranking for – these are the words your ideal customer is likely to type into a search when looking for a service or product you are selling.
But first ………
have you defined your ideal customer?
Knowing what your products and services are and can do, you should be clear about who could benefit from having them in their lives, knowing how they can help to meet and solve their challenges.
Factors to consider for your website, to help visitors stay to read the page they’ve visited
- Speed: is the speed of your website slow? Investigate the reason for this and get it fixed because visitors won’t wait for your site to load.
- Focus on the Customer: your website should be customer-centric, not about you, your products and services. Explain how you are best positioned to solve your prospect’s pain points with information is relevant and timely #CX
- Case studies: include case studies to demonstrate your experiences with helping customers overcome their challenges.
- Navigation: is your website easy to navigate? Test the navigation of your site with your customer in mind and ask yourself if it is user-friendly to someone who is visiting.
- Be specific: your website content should be specific enough to speak to your ideal customer. Be clear about how your product or service can help – the more specific you are the better.
- Language: write in a conversational style using words and phrases your target market can identify with. Avoid jargon.
- Use visual content: a sea of text is boring. Types of visual content you can use are images | videos | Infographics | photos.
- Mobile-friendly: make sure your site is mobile-responsive so that all your web pages display clearly and attractively on mobile devices. Google Search will penalise your website if it is not mobile-friendly.
- Establish Expertise: Use your website to position yourself as an expert and authority in your field. Blogging is a great way to do this and it’s one of the most shared sections of a website online. Case Studies, Thought Leadership\Opinion pieces and White Papers are an excellent means of establishing expertise within your industry.
- Blog: a blog is a great way to share good content with your customers, as opposed to a hard sale which is not popular, nor is it ranked by Google. Content has to be relevant to the customer, not to the business, so you need to know what keywords and phrases your customers search for and what data they want to read about. A blog needs to be refreshed regularly – make a decision how often you want to do this and stick to it – it is a good landing page for people looking for information.
- Offer a Lead Magnet: this is an incentive placed on your website to entice your visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. Basically you are saying “please accept this free gift in exchange for your name and email address” and once you have this, you can communicate with and market to them in the future. Your Lead Magnet could be any of the following: Report | White Paper | a Guide | a Free Consultation | a Tutorial or Webinar | Etc.
- Call to Action (CTA): tied to #11 …. each page should have a clear goal and it should guide visitors in a direction that will lead to this goal. Don’t assume they will know what to do, you need to tell them. If your CTA is to schedule a consultation, tell them to schedule a consultation.
Keep visitors on your site, don’t have them click off
Once your visitors land on your website, you will want to keep them there and not have them click off after 8 seconds. Your challenge is to keep them engaged enough to want to read more about your products and services; even better if they leave you with an email address so that you can communicate with them about the content they’ve taken the time to read
Lastly, as your company and business evolve, so will your website. Ensure your content and marketing collateral reflect the changes. Consider too your target market, which will also evolve, and communicate all changes whilst at the same time attempting to establish beneficial relationships.
Do you agree that a website is important for personal branding? Please leave a comment.