We are asked to look at websites all the time. More times than not, the results are almost the same every time. The site looked great, and it worked well too, but when it comes to results it was missing the mark. In a lot of cases, the site doesn’t getting found for much beyond the client’s own branded search words. The website design usually isn’t performing well either. It takes too long to load, is missing a site map and lacking most of the basic SEO features that help it get found for customer-centric keywords, phrases and contextual questions.
If you want to apply a similar review of your website to make sure you’re not making the same mistakes, here are some key indicators to look for on your own site.
Your Website’s Content Strategy
Everyone knows you need content on your site. Most sites today have white-papers, e-books or tip guides on their site, but they are not be presenting them properly. For example, we see a lot of sites featuring a resources sections with all of the company’s content.
Your customers are not going to spend an hour in your resources section wading through your content. You should be looking at each page as it relates to your customers’ buyer journey, and you should be giving those visitors content in context to their journey and their questions.
This also means you need to have content for every type of buyer journey contingency; awareness, consideration and decision-making stages. You need content for all the roles or titles defined by your personas. Content is needed for any of the verticals you may be targeting. You also need content that answers your customers’ questions. But most importantly, if you’re looking for sales-ready leads, you need value-added offers that outperform “contact us,” “speak with a rep,” “free consultation,” “take our demo” and “download a free trial.”
Your Website’s User Experience
You worked long and hard to get this customer to your site. The last action you want them to take is to hit the back button and leave. Instead, you want to work hard to get them to stay, click, explore the site and fill out forms. The best way to do that is to work on a website blueprint that goes page by page asking this question, “What do we want our customers to see, feel, read, view, click and do on this page?” Once you can answer this question on every single page, you’ll start planning a different type of page.
The user experience also has a lot to do with the way the site tells a story. We notice that most sites are all about you, your product and your company, when instead they should be all about your customer. You have to make your customers the hero of your website story.
People make initial purchase decisions emotionally, so you want your website to evoke an emotional feeling for your customers.
Your Website’s Connection To Every Other Marketing Tactic
Many companies still work in silos, with their search team, their website team, their email team (or their search agency), their website firm and their email marketing agency. This siloed approach is preventing you from achieving your desired results.
You should understand what keywords, phrases and questions you want to answer. Understand (in detail) your customers’ buyer journey and the questions they have during that journey. You should not be building a website until you have most of your content assets identified and completely understand how you want your visitors to flow through the site, just like you’d want to know how customers flow through a retail store.
How Sales Uses Your Website
Your website is not only for people who don’t know you. It’s also for people who are getting to know you while working with your sales team.
There should be pages and assets on the site that your sales team can leverage. The more time your prospects spend on your site, the more likely they are to become your new customers. That’s a fact. The more content prospects download and the longer they spend on your site, the more your prospects feel safe with you and want to do business with only you.
Website Metrics
Your website should be generating leads, both marketing-qualified leads and inquiries plus sales-qualified leads (people who want to talk to your sales team). If you’re not getting requests to talk to your sales team from your website, a lot is missing from your site.
The metrics that are going to help you know whether the site is working right include total visitors, visitors from organic searches, site-wide conversion rate, conversion rate from top pages, blog subscribers, bounce rate, average time on site and, of course, marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, sales opportunities from the site and revenue from site-generated opportunities. You should compile all of these data points on a dashboard and track the numbers month over month. Before you know it, you’ll have enough trend data to highlight insights that literally tell you what to work on and when.
Almost everyone coming into your sales funnel is going to start at your website. Meet someone at a party? They’ll visit your website. Get a referral? They’ll visit your website. Even if your sales team makes cold calls, those new connections are headed straight for your website. There is no way to avoid it. Your website is the window and door into your company. If the site fails, your revenue engine is going to fail.
Even the best-looking sites still fail the use case tests we discussed above based on our research. They either don’t tell a compelling story, convert visitors, drive the right experience or help your company get found in search. The good news is that you can fix almost all of these issues without having to redesign and relaunch the entire site.