By Brenna Lofquist, Senior Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing
Websites are a key component of any business. It’s where people go to learn more about your company, what services and products you provide, what others are saying about your business, and more. For marketing purposes, your website can be used to drive conversion of visitors into qualified leads, generate demand and pipeline, and accelerate the creation of opportunities–to name a few. Your website is very important.
The Website Experience
Every single visitor who lands on your website has an experience, and whether that experience is positive or not hinges on its ability to interest, engage, and convert. It’s the environment in which your content, offers, and entire customer-facing brand lives. Your website’s structure, offers, content, and look and feel all play a role in how your website is experienced.
In my mind, the website experience consists of three main areas:
- Organization and navigation
- Content, copy, and SEO opportunities
- Calls-to-action and conversion opportunities
If not set up/optimized correctly, all of these can cause drop-offs/bounces and result in a poor experience for the user.
Organization and Navigation
How your website is setup is very important from a user’s perspective. They want to be able to easily find what they are looking for otherwise they will leave, and you’ve missed out on a potential conversion. Here are some questions to ask yourself when reviewing your websites’ organization and navigation:
- Is your website challenging to navigate?
- Can your users find what they’re looking for easily?
- Is your website organized/structure in a way that makes sense for your users based on their buying journeys?
- Is your website cluttered?
A good exercise is to pretend you are a user and go through the process of trying to find information on your website. Granted, you might be very familiar with the website and know exactly where it is but try to pretend like you don’t.
Another easy way to figure out if your website is organized and the navigation makes sense is to click on a button or link within the site, did it take you to what you were expecting? Did you have to click on another button to get to what you were looking for? If you answered no to one or both questions, then something isn’t right.
Here’s four other questions to ask yourself:
- Is your website easy to use?
- Is your website intuitive and user-friendly?
- Is content easily discoverable?
- How many actions does it take for a user to download or read a piece of content?
All these questions are important to keep in mind when reviewing your website experience. The easier you can make it on your users, the more success you’ll find in generating demand.
Content, Copy, and SEO Opportunities
I could probably write an entire blog post about content, copy, and SEO opportunities for websites, but I’ll give a brief overview for now and provide some tips and questions for you to think about.
One of the biggest mistakes or things I notice on websites is that all the copy is all about the company. I’m not saying don’t have any information about your company but, you should have copy on your website that touches on the prospects pain points and issues they might be trying to solve. These types of messages are going to resonate with the prospect more instead of you telling them how great the company is.
On that note, you should also be reviewing the copy on your website and updating for SEO opportunities. If you are running any paid search campaigns through Google or Bing where you are bidding on keywords, those should be incorporated into the copy on the website. Also, think about organic search and the keywords people are using to find your business or the keywords people should be using to find your business, incorporate those too. Make sure the copy sounds natural and don’t try forcing the same word 10 times within a few paragraphs, that just won’t sound right.
Lastly, review your website for content. You should be taking advantage of most, if not all, opportunities where you can include content throughout your site. You aren’t limited to a resource center or one place where all your content lives. One of the biggest missed opportunities is additional content after a form submission, whether for a content download or contact us page.
Here are some questions to think about when reviewing your website for content, copy, and SEO opportunities:
- Does your website contain information your prospects and customers want/need?
- Does your website contain information that addresses your audience’s needs/challenges?
- Or is your website all about the company?
- Is your website written for a visitor who may not have any idea who you are?
- Does your website address the issues and challenges that your target audience cares about most?
- Is content easily discoverable and consumable? (same from previous section but applicable to both!)
- Are you providing users with enough opportunities to access content?
- Are you incorporating keywords from your ad campaigns into your website?
Now, if you are still reading and aren’t convinced you should review your website and make changes, let’s talk about the impact if you don’t. If you don’t take care of these things or aren’t optimizing your website this can impact overall revenue and profitability, business credibility and brand perception, relevance in the market, abandonment and conversion rates, SEO and search ad placement, and more. While this is not an exhaustive list, it should give you an idea of how your website truly impacts other aspects of your business.
As I mentioned previously, I am by no means a website expert however, in my experience at Heinz Marketing these are a few simple things to review and update that can hopefully have a greater impact on your demand generation engine.
Are there other things you look at while reviewing your website? Let me know, I’d love to hear!
