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Marketing Toolkit #1

Website checklist

Introduction

A website should enhance your business, not hinder it, but all too often, a website doesn’t get the results you expect, can look a bit tired, and doesn’t really convert the visitors you do get into potential customers.

Before we look at re-designing a website, we need to take a look at the good, bad AND ugly of our current website. Before we jump in and ditch the whole thing, we need to make sure that we don’t ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’. For example, you could have built up some serious SEO ranking with your current website, which could be lost if we start again from scratch.

This article is intended to walk you through the process and current ‘thinking’ around website design, and what elements an effective website should possess.

So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty…….. We’re going to cover the following topics:

1. What’s going on with your current website2. What you want to achieve with a new build3. Analysis of where you’re getting traffic4. What assets does your website currently have5. What are your competitors doing6. What’s your unique proposition7. Your target market8. Search Engine Optimisation9. Get ‘em to do SOMETHING when they visit you!10. Ongoing content11. Social media

12. Who’s in control - you or your web designer?

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The purpose of a website these days is to support your other marketing efforts. It can no longer sit alone in terms of a lead generating machine. The look, feel and purpose of a website affects your brand awareness, sales strategy AND how you’re thought of out there both in cyber land and in real life!

Before we rush in and set to with creating a new website - for many reasons, we may want to redesign our site, we need to start at the basics and take a really good look at our current website.

1. What’s going on with your current website?

We need to get our analysis hat on and take a look at the current site’s performance against determined parametres:(i) The number of visitors you’re getting: number of visits/visitors/unique visitors(ii) How many are staying on your site and for how long. Check out the % bounce rate(iii) The current rankings for your keywords(iv) How authoritative is your domain name? Does your domain name contain important keywords that describe your business?(v) Does your website make it easy for people to part with their email address/information? Does it contain a sign-up form?(vi) How many conversions does your site get?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you’re seriously undermining the ability of your website to do what you want it to do.

You need to add Google Analytics to your site to be able to access this information. It’s free, but will need some techy ability to add it to your site.

Once you’ve determined where you are currently, you can then start thinking about what you want your site to do for your business.

2. What do you want to achieve with a new website build?

Just because a website looks fantastic, there’s no gaurantee that it will achieve it’s objectives. The hard work really goes on before the website is designed. Consider the following:

Measurable objectives ie, to gain 25% increase in email address capture Check that the keywords you’re using actually attract traffic ie, people are searching for those keywords. A great tool is Google External Keywords to analyse your keyword search volume.

Be very clear about what you want your website to do, ie, do you want to collect email addresses so that you can email market to these leads? Do you want to sell product online? Do you want your visitors to contact you? Do you want your visitors to share your website?

Until you know exactly what you want your site to do, you can’t move onto the next step.

3. Do you know where your traffic is coming from?

Dead important to know this - the difference between browsers and buyers! Which marketing ‘pillar’ is driving your traffic? Do you get a lot of traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter? Are you getting organic traffic from Google when people are searching for your type of product? Are you getting traffic from PPC (Google Adwords) or Facebook Ads? How much are you paying for advertising online v how many conversions you get from it?

4. What assets does your current website have?

Again, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water - you may have many assets to your current website that you won’t want to lose. Have a think about: Your most popular pages Your best performing keywords Your number of inbound links to your site

All of these points have SEO asset which you won’t want to lose.

5. Check out the competition

What are your competitors doing well? What are they doing badly? What could you improve on?

You can run both your website and your competitors websites through http://marketing.grader.com and W3C Validator to see how you’re performing against your competitors.

After this analysis, you can then put together an

action plan to ensure that you build the right website to achieve your objectives.

6. What’s your unique proposition?

The content that you write for your website should clearly convey your UNIQUE PROPOSITION. In other words, what’s in it for your visitors? Why should they invest time in having a look at your website. What are they going to GAIN from it?

Remember that, when writing content, you simply MUST write for your visitor, not Google’s robots. If you’ve chosen your keywords properly, it shouldn’t be difficult to write these keywords into your content, but still keep it ‘humanised’.

Since June 2011, Google have changed the way they rank websites. 50% of their rankings are from metadata, but interestingly, 50% of their search rankings are from activity on other sites, ie social media, blogs etc.

7. Your Target Market

The best way to identify your target market is to visualise the sort of person that will buy from you. The more specific you can be, the better. For example, if you consider their:

GenderAgeMarital StatusWhere they liveWhat they do for a livingDo they have a family

What they do in their spare timeWhat websites they useWhat their interests areTheir incomeWhat motivates or concerns them

The more specific you can get to with this exercise, the more you’ll find writing the content for your site easier, because you have a ficticious target customer.

You may have a few different target customers, so it’s worth time spent on identifying these.

8. Search Engine Optimisation

As mentioned before, you don’t want to be trashing pages that already have good SEO rankings and/or traffic. If you plan to move some of these pages, then 301 redirects are really important so that you don’t lose this value.

Pick out a couple of important keywords per page. Optimise these keywords in your header tags and build internal links to these pages.

9. Get ‘em doing SOMETHING when they come to your site!

How frustrating it is to see your traffic increasing, but at the same time, your bounce rate increases. Ouch!! Website experiences are a bit like a ‘journey’. Your visitor is investing time by having a route round your site but it’s important that you tell them what you want them to do.

Specific calls to action should be evident on every single page of your website:

Call us now for your free quote……

Download the best way to………

Buy this now…….

Your calls to action should benefit your visitor, for example

‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ is a load of tosh really, but something like‘Lose 10lbs in 10 days with Ashtunga Yoga. Start your weight loss programme here NOW!’

Click here to find out how.

This is much more engaging because there’s a benefit to your customer.

Other calls to action could include:

EbooksPromotionsContestsFree TrialsContact usNewsletter subscriptions

10. Building Content

The more content we load onto a website, the better it ranks with Google. For example, a 10 page static website will receive much fewer visitors than a 10

page website that is constantly being added to with fresh content.

Start a blog - it is well known that companies that regularly update their blog will get around 55% more website visitors and 88% more leads than those who don’t. (Source taken from Hubspot.com)

11. Social Media

Engagement on social media platforms will add massive credibility to your marketing proposition. In fact, Google implemented ‘Caffeine’ in June 2011 in which they rank interaction and engagement by companies just as highly as they do traditional SEO.

The main learn from this is by creating a buzz online about your business, Google will pick up on it and think you’re great!

80% of what you do on social media sites should be about YOU. Remember ‘social’ means ‘social’ - you wouldn’t go to a party and suddenly engage in selling your products. It’s the same with social media. Only 20% of what you ‘put out there’ should be about up selling your products. You have to kind of ‘earn the right’ to talk about your products, not ram them down people’s throats!

If you need more information about building social media strategies, then drop me a line at alison@marketinginmotion.co.uk - I’d be happy to talk it through with you.

12. Who’s in Control? You or your web designer?

Lastly, but certainly not leastly, I hear this all the time - my web designer makes all the changes to my site. These days, it’s just NOT GOOD ENOUGH to have no control over the content on your website, your site stats or your ability to engage with your visitors.

If you haven’t got a Content Management System attached to your website, then you’re really missing a trick. Any website designer worth their salt will integrate a CMS system into a website build in order for you to manage it yourself. If your designer charges you for it, then find another one! He’s ripping you off!

Being in control of the marketing of your business is paramount to success. A website is no exception.Once you’ve paid for the website build, there will be a small hosting fee to pay to host the site, but apart from that your website should be totally under your own control.

There are many other nitty gritty things to consider when redesigning a website, but here are the important factors that a good website should have:

Great, clean design Information and calls to action above the fold Telephone number in the top right hand corner Calls to action on EVERY PAGE Clear navigation - don’t reinvent the wheel! Data collection points Clear CONTACT US information Ongoing content upload Blog Integration with social media platforms, slap a

video on You Tube (big, big plus!!) Google Analytics CMS system

If you would like to know more about redesigning your website, or anything that’s been written here, please give me a call on 07788 54504701604 601 455 or 0034 96 558 7052 or email me at alison@marketinginmotion.co.uk