Rethink your website

This is a bit of a loaded term. It can mean several different things…maybe your website needs a facelift – maybe your website needs a new strategy – maybe your website needs a full re-do to keep up with times. Only you as a business owner can know if your website is working for you. Here are some things to consider when rethinking your website.

When was the last time you check in on your website?

Are you checking on your website weekly? Monthly? Yearly? Never? If you haven’t checked your website or anything that has to do with your website in a while, I would strongly suggest you take a peek at it right now…go ahead…I’ll wait…

You want to check on your website for several different reasons:

1. Does it look the same? Sometimes with updates to linked software it might not be operating the way you left it.
2. Has it been hacked? A visitor is not going to notify you that your website has been blacklisted, he or she will simply just hit the back button.
3. If the information correct? Have you changed locations or changed a phone number and the website still has the old information? Or maybe your staff bios are very outdated.

Is your website meeting your objectives?

Oftentimes I’ve had clients say to me that they want more sales, which can mean several different things:

1. Are you making it easy for someone to contact you? Do you have the contact tab in the top of the navigation or is it buried? Is your phone number easy to find if they would just rather call and get more information?
2. Do you have a specific product/service that you want people to use? Is it featured on the home page? Is there a separate page for it?

Are you reading your data? Do you even have data?

I cannot tell you how many websites I’ve worked on that the business owners say to me, “Meesha, we aren’t getting any traffic.” To which I usually respond with, “Okay, let’s take a look at your Google Analytics and see what is going on”…”Well we don’t have anything like that on the website…we just know that we aren’t getting any calls.”

This is a fair point and a lot of people think traffic = business. Which just isn’t the case. Sometimes you can have 1,000 hits/day and no business or you can have 20 hits/day and get 5 new clients. But how will you ever know unless you have tracking installed?

If you do have tracking installed then where are they going? Sometimes these reports can be overwhelming but if you have someone break it down for you and only focus on the information you need, then it won’t be so bad.

What are visitors experiencing?

There are several ways to answer this question:

• Pay someone: There are all kind of resources out there where you can pay someone to visit your website and give you feedback on it. You give them clear goals and see if they can achieve them. Tell them to contact you…how hard is it for them to do that?
• Grab someone: I’ve found the best way to do this is to grab a friend, neighbor, mother, grandma, kid down the street or even your kid and say, “Can you figure out how to contact us?” and just stand behind them and watch. How difficult is it for them to do it? Where do they go? How did they get there?

Don’t just set it and forget it

So basically what I’ve been trying to say is: Don’t just leave your website and “hope” that it is going to work out for you. It is a huge marketing tool these days and should be a great revenue stream for you.