Could a Poorly Designed Website Be Costing You Revenue--And Maybe Your Entire Business?

 

As business owners, we rely a lot on other people's talents, connections and even advice and criticisms.

Oh, we don't really want that part to be spread around for sure. We would like other people to think that we are the proverbial self-made business folks, right?

But with something as esoteric, if that is the right word, as putting a website together to attract customers digitally, most of us realize our strengths do not lie in programming or design. We don't mind relying on others to do that part.

When Is the Last Time You Took A Hard Look at Your Website?

With all the talent in the Quad State region, we still come up with a plethora of website designers and outcomes.

1. “My niece [insert other relative or friend] knows about that website stuff, and she designed a real nice website for us for only a few bucks, isn't it beautiful?”

The owner talking directed his listener to his company's website. After studying the website for about 60 seconds, the listener asked “What are you selling here?”

Granted, I have witnessed some extremely good websites from owners who have done all the work—including programming—themselves. I'm thinking about the original owner of a well-known printing company in Washington County.

It is safe to say that these days we can get some graphically magnificent images on our websites—a lot of them for free—but do they have the purpose of directing the viewer's eyes to your company's solution? Or just look pretty?

“This local company has done a lot of websites for businesses in this area. We had them do ours, too, and it only cost $4,500 [insert figures to $10,000+].”

A local dentist was speaking to a their potential business coach. The business coach started looking into the clients of the web development firm. He found that while the copy for the sites researched all expressed the business' direction, they were all based on exactly the same website template. All the businesses looked the same.

A business needs to stand out. Boy, have we heard that phrase a lot. But the task is to stand out with a customer promise—a reason for folks to do business with you. Owners do need to take responsibility for the design of their site.

“Look, my job is to run my business. Websites are a necessary evil these days. I just need to focus on what I do best and let the digital folks focus on what they do best.”

That statement is hard to take issue with—on the surface. Yet the owner speaking here is committing the mistake a lot of owners make—that the 'digital folks' know as much about the owner's business as the owner does.

With the rise of mobile phones—some estimates put the future figure of 78% of all business decisions will be made using a mobile Internet-connected phone—it is imperative that we, as owners, look over our one, two or more websites on a regular basis to have some updating done.

A (Fairly) Agreed-Upon Website Checklist for Small Business Owners

We asked several SEO 'digital folks' in the Quad State region who also make up the Website talent on The Business Solution Network to give us their ideas. Not everyone does agree, of course, but we wanted to keep this article down below 3000 words!

This is, of course, not to be a comprehensive list as there are many other areas. It may be just the incentive you need to hire a quick check by a Quad State SEO pro to see what your site needs. Yet it is good point for us owners to think about. 

Is the 'main purpose' of your business accomplished in your website? In other words, at a glance, does it inform and offer solutions right off the bat?

• Does your copy offer clear anchor text for the search engines?
• Does your website reveal your passion(s) in the problems you are solving?
• Does your copy talk to a 'general' audience (i.e. the masses) or to a specific individual or individual group?
• Is your site boring? Are you sure your developer is building you a truly original site? Templates may be acceptable, but does your site show the sameness as other clients of the developer?
• Do you use any 'personal pain' in your solutions? In other words, in your site copy and/or your blog, do your readers understand how you came to your passion behind your solutions (be them dental, plumbing, business development or what have you)?
• Do you strive to be in alignment with keywords and Google or to be more responsive to customers and your product improvement? Unless your target market is selling to affiliate product markets (Amazon, etc.), the intent for this tip comes from asking owners to be more concerned with building their business/product/customer relationship quality and pay less attention to pleasing Google.
• When was the last time you had your site updated?

Quad State Web Developers Offer a Special to Quad State Owners

The Quad State Web developers of the Business Solution Network (www.TheBusinessSolutionNetwork.com) have offered any reader of the Quad State Business Journal a full website review or refreshment of any one of their business websites from this BSN Solution link:

http://thebusinesssolutionsnetwork.com/great-web-design.html

There are actually several developers combined with this offer but they have all agreed that 100% of the monies paid BSN for this special project will be earmarked for a local nonprofit before the end of 2013.

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Addendum:

After reading my own post again—I see I needed to focus on the last keyword from the bottom where I could have more pointedly explained why the SEO pros (not me, please) were kind of anti-Google IMHO.

After getting sat down and held by the hand by one of our Business Solution Network pros, here are some additional points.

First, not for the cause of Google's keyword searches, but the business owner is the one who needs to sit down and quantify his or her customer's needs. Give a 'story behind the story' (as Paul Harvey used to say) rendering of how your business's solutions will benefit the reader.

Next, are you committing to the 'truly important' things that matter to your readers and impact them...or donors or members or patients? See above.

Next, and I thought this was really valuable and we all think it but few of us owners actually follow through, but think in terms of value based marketing. It's kind of an extension of one, but this is you creating business value that is understandable to and easily used by your customers.

Last but not least, keep on with continuous improvement to keep customers coming back. It's not that our customers are fickle necessarily, but it is a natural human tendency to compare prices, compare offers, compare our own personal cost values before we make a purchase.

This value part of your business, product or service is what your marketing should be communicating to your customers. This is the part that goes beyond keyword matching.

When I was involved in direct mail marketing, demographic overlays were the prime innovation in direct mail. That is until psychographic (interests) overlays became the new insight for our industry and clients.

One could make the case that keyword research is only the demographic part. Then comes the psychographic or what the customer values as per their interests. Once the 'why people buy from you' task is solved, the 'how' is duck soup easy.

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