When was your last website redesign? If you’re like many businesses, you’re on a 2-3 year website redesign cycle according to Nuvonium’s blog.
That’s not just updating your contact information or adding a product, we’re talking about a complete overhaul of your existing website.
Why do so many businesses want a website redesign every couple years? A quick list of common answers includes these awful responses:
- “My website lacks flair”
- “We need to improve our SEO”
- “I want to look bigger”
- “We need to add product information”
- “The competition just updated theirs”
These are the same answers we’ve heard time and again from our website redesign leads.
But these are classic mistakes that lead to dumb decisions.
A website redesign may satiate your flair fixation, improve your SEO rankings, and even make you look “bigger,” but it won’t magically fix your underlying business problems.
You can have your dream website redesign, but it’ll turn into a nightmare if you still haven’t addressed these 5 issues.
1. You don’t target your target.
Your website redesign is all about you – it’s your idea of how it should look, what it should say, and how it should function.
Get beyond yourself and start actually targeting your target audience.
This impacts everything from the information on your home page to the tone of voice throughout the website. Focus on your buyer persona in every area of your website redesign, especially:
- Home page content – help them find the information they want, ASAP.
- Navigational structure – how easily can they find the level of detail they need?
- Type of content – text, images, video, etc. What appeals to them?
- Tone of voice – friendly or formal, it should meet their expectations.
- Your offerings – focus on solving their problems, not touting your solution.
2. You aren’t being found by your target audience
You’ve redesigned your website and even paid a little bit of attention to optimizing for keywords that are all about your business. But the right people aren’t finding your site.
When I think about my business, I have a whole set of jargon keywords that make me feel good about what I do. When you think about my business, you probably have a completely separate description.
I talk in terms of solutions I provide, you talk about problems you face. The pain and the solution may match up, but you wouldn’t find me if I only optimized my website for my idea of what I am.
It’s critical to structure your website redesign about the language your prospects use. It’s equally important to not simply assume that they’ll magically appear on your site. Find them through search engine optimization by using their language, but also find them through targeted social media engagement – add value to the spaces where they spend time online.
Being found happens when you adopt your target audience’s perspective.
3. You don’t have any way to capture leads.
One of the biggest mistakes on the web – your website redesign is flawless…except that you have no way to gather any lead intelligence and contact information.
A visitor may not be ready to buy instantly, but that doesn’t mean that they have no value to you. They’re probably just a little earlier in the purchasing process than you wish that they were.
If you have helpful resources that your visitors care about, it should be simple to start generating leads from your website. Help those folks through the educational phase of the sales cycle – the trust that you build will give you a huge advantage when the time is right.
Start implementing calls-to-action, landing pages, forms, thank-you pages, and email follow-up right away, in an integrated system that makes life easy for everyone.
4. You don’t ever follow-up with your audience.
Even if you’ve targeted the right people, optimized your website redesign, gathered leads, and measured everything, you could still be throwing away thousands of dollars because you never follow up with the database you’re building.
Get a system in place to capitalize on your website redesign by nurturing your leads throughout the buying cycle. Gathering email addresses and names is pointless unless you follow-up and can grow your business because of those lead generation efforts.
5. You aren’t measuring ROI
As Peter Drucker famously said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
A website redesign alone won’t get you anywhere if you’re not measuring the results to learn what works and what flops.
Put a system in place to measure the traffic, leads, and sales generated through your website. Take the time to review those results and constantly tweak the system to improve it.
If you can’t prove that it’s working, why are you still investing?
30-Second Summary
Don’t put money into redesigning your website until you’ve put thought into how that redesign will tangibly grow your business and help you achieve your goals.
Target your target audience, get found, convert leads, nurture those leads, and measure the return on your investment.
If you’re not doing any of these things, a website redesign may be in order, but only once the strategy is in place.
The reading part is over, now it’s time to do it.
Download The Complete Web Design Strategy Checklist, start putting your goals on paper, and planning your next website redesign. It will be worth your time!