Owning a business is a lot of work. There are 1,000,000 things calling for your attention and you don’t have time to devote 100% attention to any of them. One area of your business that you simply can’t ignore, no matter what industry you’re in, is your website. Here are some eye popping statistics that point to the need for a website redesign:
- Internet browsing from mobile and tablet devices accounts for 13.2% of unique visitor traffic. source: Net Applications
- Social networks account for 20% of the time spent online. source: Wall Street Journal
- 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads online. source: Search Engine Land
- Overall Content Marketing Strategy Leads to 2,000% Lift in Blog Traffic, 40% Boost in Revenue. source: Marketing Sherpa
- SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (such as direct mail or print advertising) have a 1.7% close rate. source: Search Engine Journal
Redesigning your website can help you capture the shifting tide in the way consumers use technology and use it to your advantage. Here are five important things you need to include in your website redesign.
Fresh Content
You don’t want your website to feel like the waiting room at the dentist’s office with those old and outdated magazines sitting on the table. If you want to attract visitors to your website, there has to be a reason for them to stop by!
Sharing fresh content on your website through a blog is a great way to draw new visitors from search engines and from social media sites. If you would like to learn more about what it takes to do blogging well, check out this post: How to Grow Your Business Online with a Blog.
Responsive Design
More and more people are using tablets and smart phones to access the Internet. When a visitor comes to your website on their smart phone, a responsive design will resize your website to fit their device.
Check this out, if you’re reading this on a laptop or desktop, take your cursor over to the far right side of the page. Now shrink the size of the Internet window. See how this post is shrinking and reformatting. Pretty cool, huh!
If you want to test your website to see how it looks on different devices, check out this site: Studio Press Responsive Test.
Social Media Channels
20% of the time spent on the Internet is on social media sites. LinkedIn, Twitter, Google +, Facebook, and Yelp have become the place where people go to get answers and recommendations.
Your potential customers may feel more comfortable communicating with you with a tweet rather than a phone call. We recommend making it easy for a prospect to connect with you by placing links to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn on your site.
Landing Pages with Forms
There is a big difference between a website visitor and a lead in the sales funnel for your business. This threshold is crossed on a landing page with a form.
To really connect and follow up with someone who found your business online, you need a little bit of information from them. Smart businesses use content marketing to create an information exchange with visitors. You provide a piece of smart content like a webinar recording or white paper and the prospect gives their name and email. A simple exchange with amazing potential.
Optimized Page Titles
Coach John Wooden is a legend in the college basketball world. In his time as a head coach, he won 10 NCAA national championships. This amazing coach was known for being a stickler for the details. At the start of every season, he would stand in front of his team of Division-I basketball players and teach them how to properly put on their socks.
Coach Wooden knew that if players put their socks on wrong, there was a chance they could get blisters. If a player got a blister, they wouldn’t be able to play up to their full potential. Since proper sock placement was something that was within their control, there was no reason any of his players should ever suffer a blister from a wrinkle in their sock.
Optimized page titles are one of the little stickler details that play a big role in search engine optimization. Each page on your website, including blog posts, has a unique title. This title is one of the things search engines read when they are searching for results to a query. So when you’re thinking about what terms your business would like to be known for, start adding them to pages that relate to that topic.
Just like Coach Wooden and his socks, this is something that you can control that will effect the outcome of your website’s performance.