Is Your Website Working For You?

In this increasingly Internet-connected and mobile world, your website plays a crucial role in your marketing and sales efforts.

So, how are you doing?

Is your website helping or hurting you?

At a minimum, your website should serve as your marketing “hub” – the place where customers and prospects can find all of the information they want and need about your company, your products and services – easily and quickly (no hunting through internal pages). To truly power your marketing and sales, however, your website should also serve as a resource center, providing valuable information to clients and prospects, and as a tool for you, to help you collect information from visitors to the site in order to build your sales lists, enable you to make more sales, and manage your customer service.

Here are some tips to power up your website:

High-quality content is critical. Of course, the content on your website should showcase your product and service offerings. It should clearly convey your brand proposition – the benefits that customers get from using your company, especially those benefits that they can’t get from your competitors.

But that’s only part of the message your website should convey. The other part is that your company is a go-to source for valuable, useful and reliable information. Providing this value-added information to visitors for free is called content marketing, and it’s an effective technique for building engagement with both existing customers and prospects. To learn more about the power of content marketing, read our blog post here.

How do you use your website for content marketing? Add a blog, offer a newsletter, or post news releases about your company. Content means more than just written words too. Consider adding video, audio or still images to your website.

Help your prospects find and connect with you. You can’t convert prospects to customers if they can’t get in touch with you. Make sure you make it easy for them by providing your contact information (telephone number, physical address, and e-mail address), in a prominent location on every page of your website (not under the little “contact us” link way at the bottom of the home page). This is especially critical if you serve a local or regional market. Consumers increasingly use the Internet to search for products and services in their specific geographic area, so help them find you right in their neighborhood. A contact form makes it convenient for them to get in touch with you directly and also provides you with their contact information for future sales calls. If your company uses social media, don’t forget to include links to all of your social media pages and accounts. And in today’s mobile society, a mobile device-friendly website is essential.

Gather information. Your website can be an invaluable tool for gathering information on prospects to use in later marketing and sales efforts. Encourage visitors to give you their e-mail information by inviting them to sign up for your newsletter, to get notified of new posts to your blog, or receive special “e-mail only” offers and promotions. Invite visitors to “request more information” or “request a quote” with a form that allows them to enter their contact information and request a call from a sales representative.

Reward your visitors. To encourage people to visit your site, not just once, but repeatedly, consider rewarding them with “Internet only” discounts and promotions. Provide them with free resources – tools to help them maximize the use of your products and services (more on using your website for customer service, below), links to other vendors of interest to your residential or commercial customers, or even cross-marketing promotions with those other vendors.

Enhance the customer experience. Remember that your existing customers are also prospects for additional products and services and referral sources for new customers. Provide a dedicated customer-only area of your website (secured by log-in credentials and with the appropriate data security measures) where they can manage their account, pay bills, schedule service calls and report issues. Make sure that while the customer-only areas are password protected, the service offerings are visible to all visitors to your website. Using your website for customer service not only allows you to provide a better customer experience for your existing customers, it shows prospects that your company is customer-focused and customer-friendly.

And finally, a few words about search engine optimization (SEO). When people hear SEO they start to get a little scared – as if it’s some form of voodoo or magic practiced on the Internet. In reality, SEO is any activity you undertake to improve your website’s visibility and ranking for organic searches – to help get your online content found by your target audience. While there are some basic SEO principles, there is no one right way to do SEO. In fact, because search engines are constantly refining their search algorithms (Google changes its algorithms more than 300 times a year – almost once a day), any “expert” who promises to boost your rankings without focusing on the overall quality and quantity of the content on your site is misleading. The better way is to practice good, basic website practices: good site structure; relevant, detailed and helpful content that helps search engines index you properly; working internal and external links; and appropriate use of keywords and tags – ones that fit naturally into your content.

To learn more about SEO, read this quick-guide from Moz.