As the owner of a small or mid-sized business, you may also be the person responsible for managing your corporate website. Among your many talents, you are also the most informed and passionate about the high-quality goods and services your company offers. However, if website design and development isn’t your personal forte, then you might be missing potential revenue due to inadvertent misses with your website content or strategy. The global marketplace is constantly growing, and keeping your page at the top of the search engine results pages means keeping current on website design trends and best practices. Consider these points as you contemplate whether your site is responding fully to the needs of your targeted customers.
Evaluate Your Bounce Rate:
The “bounce rate” reflects the percentage of site visitors who leave after viewing only one page. If visitors don’t click through from your home page to the other pages that detail your wares, you are losing potential customers and sales. Your home page should be strategically designed to entice your visitors with images and text that respond to their needs, AND to direct them quickly and easily to the pages that contain your solution to their problem.
There are many reasons why viewers might bounce off your home page:
- There’s an absence of links to additional relevant information. Sometimes called “breadcrumbs,” these links navigate to the other pages within your site.
- There’s an absence of related links that “marry well” with your content. If you also run a blog on another site – an industry group site, or LinkedIn, for example – adding a link to that site might provide the additional information for which your potential customer is looking.
- There is no clear “Call to Action”. It is imperative to make navigation of your site as simple as possible. Placing the “Buy now” button in an easy-to-see location makes it more likely that potential customers will hit it and convert to actual customers.
Eliminate a Messy or Confusing Layout:
It may seem appropriate to load the home page with every conceivable digital tool, to optimize sales and even increase advertising revenue. However, too much activity on any one page can be disconcerting to viewers. Sites that include videos, multiple pop-ups or numerous ads (all of which may launch when the site’s URL is entered) can delay the opening of the full site and cause immediate departures by impatient consumers. While those tools can provide a significant benefit to your business, unless they are skillfully used, they can also scare your potential customers away from it. Google provides an analysis tool to seek feedback where you can test your site’s loading speed and performance.
Identify Where Your Traffic is Coming From:
Your marketing strategy may include specifically targeted technologies, based on your intended target population. For some target markets, the search engine results will drive “organic” traffic to your site (“organic” = keywords entered into a search engine, and your specifically chosen SEO (search engine optimization) language has directed them to your landing page). Other markets might direct hits to your site through social media interaction. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other such sites allow their users to “like” and recommend favourite sites to their friends and colleagues. Still other customer interaction might come from your existing customers who return to your site because of their satisfaction with it and your goods or services. Collecting data from each of these metrics will help you measure how successfully your website engages with your potential consumers.
At McAllister Marketing, we have mastered the website design tools and strategies that harness the full power of today’s most advanced web design technologies. Our goal is to identify the connections between your target market and your proprietary goods and services, and secure those connections through today’s advanced website tools. If you’ve reviewed your existing site and have determined that its success and profitability could be improved, contact us today for a consultation.