Abracadabra.
When it comes to business websites, there are only two kinds: Those that work, and those that don’t.
The ones that work get found by search engines, generate leads, and help you convert those leads into prospects and paying customers.
The ones that don’t work just sit there, ineffective or under-effective, taking up space and wasting precious time that could be better used to drive traffic and revenues.
If your website is one of those underperforming web properties, and you’ve concluded that enough is enough, it’s time to transform your website into a true business asset—perhaps even your most important business asset. Here are a few tips to help you make that transformation quickly, easily, and effectively.
Take Me to Your Leads
Begin by understanding the fundamental purpose of a business website: to generate leads. Successful websites attract prospects by offering great content, by maximizing search engine optimization (SEO), and by converting the leads it generates into people who click through and provide their contact information so you can convert them from leads into paying customers. A successful website is also one designed to help you measure the return on investment (ROI) you make from your website, your marketing campaigns, and other efforts.
To Blog, or Not to Blog? (Hint: You Already Know the Answer)
You may have heard this before. Even so, you cannot hear it often enough: on the interweb, content is king. Create useful, valuable, interesting content. If you don’t have the skills to do that in-house, hire someone who does. Good content attracts readers, holds their attention, and brings them back time and again. It triggers search engine results via keywords and prompts readers to take the next step via calls-to-action that lead them to a landing page that captures all their vitals—name, address, phone, email, business they’re in, and what it is they’re shopping around for.
Search engines love fresh content. Publish everything—blog articles, podcasts, presentations, photos, ebooks, newsletters—as long as its high quality, valuable content. Then, promote it via social media. The more you publish, the more tickets you have in the mega-lottery that makes getting found online easier.
Four Steps to Website Transformation
Apply these four steps to magically transform your website:
1) Audit your website, and protect your key assets. Determine which content, links, keywords, and conversion tools are your most important assets. Use tools, such as those HubSpot provides, to do this. Find the most popular, most powerful content; keep it, and lose the rest. Figure out which links drive the most traffic; protect them, and ditch the losers. Decide which keywords rank best for you. Keep those, dump the weakest ones, and figure out which new ones you might want to add. Study your conversion tools to see which generate the most leads and which are most successful at converting leads. Identify your most valuable URLs; protect them with redirects, if necessary.
2) Art projects are for museums. Invest more in great content than pretty design. No, your website shouldn’t look atrocious, but search engines are design-blind. Google doesn’t reward beautiful graphics; it lives and breathes words and numbers only. Use a blog to disseminate your content, and your website will be over 400 percent more likely to get indexed by search engines, 97 percent more likely to attract links, and will generate 55 percent more visitors than sites that don't maintain a blog.
3) Keep it simple. Design your conversion experiments so they are clear, ask for limited information, and appear above the fold on-screen. Tracking your conversion rates so you can constantly improve how your website delivers for you is critical. The logic is simple: faster experiments yield results more quickly. Use HubSpot tools to design landing pages that can be deployed by a single person in 15 minutes or less.
4) Don’t measure absolutely everything. Concentrate on three to five metrics. The easier it is to measure the results of your web marketing, the easier it is to succeed and meet your goals.
If you’re going to transform your website, do it right and for the right reasons. Transformation for the sake of transformation is not a good reason. Because the CMO or the CEO wants something different is not a good reason. Because you haven’t changed things up in a while? Also, a no-no.
The defining reason to transform your website is to improve the results it delivers for you, which might include more visits and visitors, better qualified leads, or higher conversion rates of those leads into paying customers.
How many rabbits do you need to pull out of your hat to make these changes to your website today?
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Learn everything you need to know before you embark on the path of redesigning your site.
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