Your website is an exceptional way to match your brand messaging to the needs of different buyer personas. By taking the time to categorize your pages to fit these personas, and offer content in a way that your prospects can easily find what’s relevant to them, you will have a better performing, longer standing, and more productive business building machine for your company. Unfortunately, if your site is not performing at 100, you are probably throwing away valuable leads every hour of every day.
Now, what if you could fix that and have this hard-working machine up and running 24 hours a day—always attracting leads, converting visitors into contacts WHILE growing your personal base of customers into brand advocates?
Sounds good, right?
In today’s Thought Hive, let’s take a look at some action items you can take today to better position your website for success.
Establish a Unique Value Proposition
Before you begin crafting your content, be clear about your Unique Value Proposition (UVP). Your UVP is a statement or message that describes what your company does, how you solve your customer's needs, and how that sets you apart from your competitors. So you need to have your UVP consistent across your entire website.
For instance, if you attract a high number of unique visitors, or you’re a new business, your visitors might not be very familiar with who you are. By setting a clear UVP to your audience, you are informing them how you can best serve them through not only your products and services, but also as it shows through your content.
Focus on identifying your target audience, communicating an authentic message that they want and need and project yourself as an “expert” within your niche.—Kim Garst
Set Goals
Every website has a purpose. Sometimes that purpose is lost in the design planning stage if you are not careful. Establishing clearly defined goals in the planning phase will assist in building the concrete foundation that your website desperately needs to achieve success.
Think about it. Each piece of content you create has an objective. Your contact page is designed to provide information to the visitor, and the information living on the contact page should reflect how to contact your company. Imagine you have a contact page with images of your office building or storefront without a telephone number. It defeats the purpose, right? Set goals and achieve them with a well-thought-out website development plan for every single page on your website.
Establish a needs based website development plan
If your business is fast paced, you may have found yourself thinking about your website needs from time to time, but something ‘bigger’ always comes up. When it's time to sit down and have a meeting, it may be difficult to remember all of the smaller details.
Create a needs based website development plan as a living document. Split this document in a way that presents prioritized needs of your website from all aspects of the business. Also include a spot for internal and external website update suggestions. This will ensure your website evolves in the most productive manner possible if you are performing an in house website redesign. If you are currently working with a design service or you are looking into one, this document will make the process much more fluid.
For quick tips about how to tell if your website needs a redesign and the effectiveness of inbound web design, check out our following In-Sites video:
Organize Your Page Titles, Header Tags, and On-Page SEO tactics
If you website has clever, but arbitrary titles that do not clearly describe its purpose to visitors, it is ineffective to your visitors and to the search engines. You should have a distinguished list of keywords that will clearly communicate the objectives of your website and align with your business goals.
Example
Startup Sally has decided it is time to get the website development process in motion for her newly developed SaaS program for Hairstylists to aid them with time management and business organization. The keyword list she has chosen is about 200 keywords long and all focus on three main themes:
- Time management in a salon setting.
- Creative customer service for salon stylists.
- Salon and stylist business building strategies.
These themes are all focused on the potential customer and their particular needs as it pertains to Sally’s product. Sally’s keyword list could include keywords such as:
- managing time in a salon setting
- Salon Customer service
- hair stylist time management
- business building skills in a salon setting
- and so on...
The idea here is to pick the keywords that best align with what your target audience is searching for, and utilize these keywords in the page titles and copy on your website.
This helps your website visitors not only navigate your website but understand exactly why their search engine brought them to your site in the first place.
For every page, pick one or two keywords that the content of the page revolves around. Once you determine your keyword(s), use on-page SEO tactics, such as internal link building and optimizing your header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) to encourage search engine rankings but still appeal to the user experience.
The success of a page should be measured by one criteria: Does the visitor do what you want them to do?—Aaron Wall
Test. Test. Test.
Finally take the time to A/B test your website. Bounce off current modern web design trends and let your audience experience the pros and cons of your design. Especially with Growth Driven Design, you can quickly get your website into your audience’s hands while constantly creating action items to tackle their needs as they experience your website. Because once you learn from your audience about what they need to see in your website, the more your team can be clear when they’re designing it. In fact, check out the following infographic provided by Entrepreneur about the 8 Web Design Trends of 2016:
As you can see there are several ways you can adjust and tweak your website to better serve your audience. When you are establishing your brand recognition and thought leadership in your industry, your website must demonstrate user experience excellence. Try using these tips in your next website redesign and see how your traffic and qualified lead generation improves.
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Suggested Links
FAQ Friday: Your Questions about the Website Redesign Process Answered
Is A Traditional Website Still Effective Website Design?
FAQ Friday: Interactive Marketing and Growth Driven Design
Thought Hive: Storytelling with Growth Driven Design
