All businesses worth their salt, no matter what size they are, will have a company website that often acts as the first point of contact for any potential new customers or clients. In many instances however, small and medium sized businesses may have spent a considerable amount of time building and setting up their site but very little time on it since then.
That’s not because small business decision makers don’t understand the importance of their websites of course but simply because there generally isn’t enough time in the day for everything that needs to be done. If that is a situation that rings true with you, and if you may have been neglecting your website of late, it may well be worth your while considering the following key aspects of your site and whether it is performing as well as it should in those areas.
Ease of Navigation
Your site can be as attractive as you like and can contain all manner of useful and interesting content, but if a brand new visitor can’t understand the layout or finds it difficult to navigate then they won’t be likely to stick around and read that content.
With that in mind, it is crucial to ensure that your site is as simple and easy to navigate as possible in order to persuade visitors to spend more time browsing and potentially becoming customers. A quick and simple way to test how your site rates in this regard is to visit the site – or better still get a friend or relative uninvolved with your company to visit – and to pretend that you or they are a brand new visitor who has never seen the site before. If navigation to interesting or useful information is quick and easy to grasp then great, but if not then you may need to change layouts, categories and other navigation features.
Quality of Content
The quality and usefulness of the content on your website is absolutely crucial in a number of ways. Firstly, if your site is the first point of contact that a potential customer of client has with your company, then the quality of the information they find will go a long way toward forming their impression of your company. What’s more, if visitors can find the answers to their questions and queries on your site they are less likely to need to contact you directly, helping to save you and your staff valuable time.
Content on your website then, should be optimised to provide visitors with as much useful information as possible as well as being tailored to perform well in terms of SEO. That content too, should be kept as up to date and relevant as possible, as there is nothing more embarrassing for a company than being challenged by a potential customer over incorrect or old information they have found on your site.
Sales Focus
Whether your site actually features online ordering or not, it should be working as hard and as efficiently as possible to drive sales and encourage visitors to become customers. If you do have online shopping then, it is crucial to regularly ensure that it is working correctly and if you don’t, it may be worth considering whether you could add that dimension.
If yours is not a firm where online ordering is possible however, your website should still be optimised for potentially creating business. That means having clear and varied methods of contact (phone numbers, email addresses and enquiry forms) and including clear calls to action amongst your content.
Taking a little time to optimise your website therefore, can save you loads of time in the long run and ensure that you’re not losing out on potential business. For similar IT advice, as well as far more in-depth strategy and services, EC-MSP’s friendly advisors are ready, willing and able to assist you.
