If your small business is seemingly a little unorganized these days, can you put your finger on just what exactly is wrong?
For many people running their own companies, the myriad of daily tasks can sometimes leave them feeling a little overwhelmed. If that describes you, your brand could be suffering as a result.
One of the keys to success for any business is its website.
Without a formidable and organized website, one’s business can miss out on potential revenue, the ability to grow the company, and social media opportunities.
So, is your website as organized as it should be?
Maintain a Winning Website from Day One
In order for your brand to achieve its maximum rate of success, it is important to be sure that you have a website churning on all cylinders.
You can go about doing just that by making sure your site has the following:
- Organization – First and foremost, how organized is your website? If you have a site which is hard to navigate, comprised of broken links (see more below) and error-filled copy, along with sections of what essentially looks like filler, how long can you truly expect visitors to want to stay? Sites such as tradebit and many others make it easy for viewers to come and go without much if any trouble. Always review your site to make sure it is organized from front to back, the page order makes sense as far as what you have on the site, and you make it easy for visitors to get the information they need and/or ask questions (see below) if necessary;
- Navigation – If your site’s navigation is hard to follow, don’t look for too many return visitors. The site should have pages that flow naturally, meaning most important stuff up front etc. It is also important that the pages open up quickly, not leave visitors watching a clock go around and/or getting a page is waiting to open type message. Lastly, be sure that all of the pages work. If you have pages that are giving viewers “404 error” messages and the like, you set yourself up for trouble;
- Content – What kind of content are you placing on your website? If the content is informative and authoritative, you should be getting a fair amount of traffic. On the flip side, uninformative and stale content can land you few visitors, not to mention a possible drop in your Google ranking. If you’re not up to writing top-notch content yourself (or with your staff), consider outsourcing your content needs. Marketing companies, along with many independent contractors who specialize in guest posting, can easily assist you with your copy needs. If you’ve taken the marketing copy on your site for granted up to now, change that thought process moving forward;
- Imagery – If your website is just about all copy, you will probably put readers to sleep in a short amount of time. Having imagery (positive images at that) is important in attracting and retaining viewers. For example, if you run a healthcare business for senior citizens, your website wants images of happy people. Yes, people needing healthcare oftentimes are not happy about the situation, but you want to show the end results when they are feeling better etc. You should also consider using video on your site. Your videos could be of happy senior citizens providing customer testimonials of your products and/or services. If you opt for such videos, keep them relatively short (30 to 60 seconds), along with leaving a call to action at the end for other seniors;
- Socialize – Finally, always make sure you do as much as you can with social media. With the right amount of social networking activity, your website is able to expose itself to countless eyes on important business sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and more. Share and tweet links back to your site’s content, imagery, videos and other worthwhile items. Also it is wise to do some cross-promotions, giving you the opportunity to get maximum social media exposure.
A website is oftentimes viewed as a company’s bread and butter.
With that being the case, it is critical that all businesses (including yours) put the maximum amount of time and effort into having an organized website from the start.