Where Does Your Website Fit Into Your Online Strategy?
April 30, 2009, 10:17 am
As the economy slumps and small business owners find themselves with a bit more free time, the smart ones are finding ways to use that time to reach more customers. Sprucing up the ol’ website is the best place to start.
Now is the perfect time for an overhaul – a web site should never remain static for too long. But, before you post an ad for a designer on Craig’s List (or, ahem, hire the fine folks at TechKnowMe), you need to figure out where your website fits in your overall online marketing strategy. If your website is your online marketing strategy… we really need to talk.
Your website is only a single part of your overall web presence – probably the most important one. Your web presence consists of every mention of you or your company on the Internet, including links from vendors and trade organizations, customer reviews, online articles that feature your company, posts you’ve made on message boards and even your profiles on social sites like LinkedIn. Search for your company on Google – your web presence consists of those results that link directly to your web site.
Not seeing many results? You may be tempted to run off and pay some SEO “expert” thousands of dollars to guarantee top-ten placement in the major search engines. but I implore you: FIGHT THAT TEMPTATION. I’ll show you better ways to build your web presence in the coming days. For now, let’s focus on creating something worth visiting.
While you may have some control over what those search results say about you and your company, nothing represents your brand quite like your own web site, over which you should have total control. When a visitor arrives at your site, they need to find exactly what they’re looking for in the fewest number of steps or you’ve lost them. You can help them by creating clear navigational pathways for them to follow to become customers.
Start by looking at all of the products and services you offer and consolidating them into a handful of related categories – no more than five, if you can do it. Each of these categories should have their own pages, clearly describing what they contain and linking to the next step in the path – either a further refining of the category or, better yet, the exact service or product being offered. Once the visitor has arrived at the page that contains the exact offering, they must see a clear way to convert themselves from a mere browser to a paying customer. In the case of a service you provide, this can be a contact form, lead prequalification form or even a calendar they can use to set an appointment with you. If you’re selling a product, the call to action is obvious – add the item to the shopping cart and collect their payment.
At this point, you’re probably wondering how all of these pathways reduce the number of steps for your visitors. If they’re coming to your site through your homepage, it actually adds steps to the process – we’ve traded convenience for clarity. Visitors to your homepage may have no prior experience with your company, so refining their search with each consecutive step will help them tremendously, even if it means a couple of additional clicks. The real impact in laying out your site in pathways comes when you stop looking at your homepage as the sole entry point to your site.
Each page that brings a visitor closer to their goal should be treated as its own homepage for that part of the site. These are called “landing pages” as a visitor can bypass the homepage, land on these pages and start off closer to their goal. Designing your site so that each page can be its own landing page requires a bit of planning – the visitor has not seen the previous pages in the path, so each page must stand on its own.
Once you’ve laid your site out as a series of landing pages, you can share links that relate directly to what you offer. For example, if you’re a mechanic purchasing online ads targeting people with bad transmissions, that ad can link directly to the page that describes your transmission repair service. Visitors who click on it will immediately find what they were looking for and be more likely to convert into paying customers.
The power of such a site design will become even more obvious when we talk about getting inbound links from other websites. Take the time now to review your site’s current layout and see how you can turn each page into a landing page so you’ll be prepared for the next step.
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