Marketing — Updating Your Website
Question: When I started my business three years ago, I invested in a website. I keep hearing you need to update it. Can you give me any good reason to invest in updating my website?
Answer: Your website is like a virtual storefront. It must be interesting and attracting to get your potential buyers to take your call for action to call or go to the next page. You need to provide visitors to your site with a reason to stick around and explore more than your home page.
According to expert Jayson DeMers, Founder, and CEO or AudienceBloom, there are four signs that your site might need revamping, which means additional investment in your website.
- The site isn’t being responsive. Once upon a time, mobile devices were a wonderment. Today they are commonplace. They are constantly being updated to undertake more and more tasks that were once relegated to your desktop or your notebook. Today the majority of web traffic is from mobile devices. Your website must appear just as vibrant on a smartphone as it does on a desktop. It is critical if you want to stay in the technology loop with your customer base, you update your site to be responsive otherwise it will phase out. Make sure you have metrics in place to determine if the site is working for you in generating opportunities for
- Your sites unused features. When you created and launched your website, you decided what should be included. Over time some of those features may infrequently be visited, and therefore are superfluous. Any portions of the site that are not being regularly used are a waste of space. Eliminate them and redesign the layout to optimize its
- Your site takes too long to load. The trend is not to have so much content that needs to be downloaded when opening that it takes too much time. Time that your visitors don’t want to spend waiting. After about 5 seconds, visitor interest begins to wane. Internet providers and smartphone carriers are limiting the amount of data that is to be downloaded. If your site is taking, more than 5 seconds seek out a web designer to assess your web site’s
- Visitors are not getting passed your home page. Check out your site analytics (Google Analytics) and check out where visitors are going to your home page. If you are losing visitors after their homepage stop, take a look at your home page and explore how to make it more inviting or consider a redesign that will allow visitors to explore more easily with incentives to get them beyond the home
- Are you losing visitors over time? Do visitors come once and return or never visit again. Maybe your SEO is not functioning, or your site is becoming stale. When was the last time you inputted anything new on your website? Without new materials, the site loses traction and therefore visitors won’t come
- The purpose of your site may have changed. You may have launched your site to raise awareness of your organization, its products, and services. Today, it might be for e-commerce. In that case, you need to rebrand and redesign your
- You are experiencing high bounce rates. If Google Analytics indicated a high bounce rate, you need to take note. This represents the number of site visitors that leave your site after visiting one page. If you bounce rate is above 75, your site needs a
- Before doing any of the above and check to see if the search engines, Google, Yahoo, or Bing even know your site exists. If you find this might be the issue, remember to update the site regularly with new and fresh information and make sure it is coded correctly. If you are nowhere on search engines, then it might be time for a website overhaul.
If you entertain a facelift or redesign, consider these essential tips:
Pay attention to aesthetics. Visitors want functionality, but they want an attractive landing page.
Improve your site speed. Nothing will discourage visitors from exploring your site faster than slow processing speeds.
Provide easy navigation. Speed does nothing for your visitor if they cannot find what they are interested in seeing.
Update it frequently. Take the trouble to update your site frequently to stay in the forefront of the technology your site visitors expect.
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