I have assisted with a number of product beta’s over the years, but was flattered when Microsoft contacted me to do an interview about my involvement in the AdCenter beta program.
Your company website has the role of a sales person, working 24/7, representing your company, answering questions, educating the prospect. Many times it will be the first impression prospects will have of your business and should convey quality at every turn. Like any good sales rep, its appearance should be a reflection of its audience, wearing tennis shoes if it’s selling skateboards and a suit if it’s selling financial advice.
A website is in many cases the first impression someone has of your company and doing it right can make a huge difference in the sale of your products and services. For traffic to translate into sales, you need a solid message, a unique selling proposition, and content that engages the prospect, answers questions, and addresses key concerns.
Let the Designer Design
When you work with a designer, keep your focus on the message and let the designer design. You hired a professional for reason and becoming too involved with the design will often compromises the results. In the end, the money you spend on quality website design, content and copy writing will pay dividends in sales for years to come.
Don’t go cheap
Companies who wouldn’t think twice about spending thousands on booth design, promotional items, and direct mail for a trade show, will often attempt to market the same products and services on the Internet with a budget they might allocate for designing a brochure. Or worse, hire a friend that “does websites”, paste in some blurbs from a brochure, and feel they have covered their bases.
A website is not a brochure
Unlike a brochure, a website can be an interactive portal to your company and its products and services. It can enable customers to ask and get answers to questions in real time. It can capture leads, provide product demonstrations, take orders and solicit reviews and get product feedback.
Keep the copy crisp and write in common terms
The copy should be carefully written to convey your understanding of the market and the solutions you provide. Care must be taken to avoid proprietary terms, techno-babble and unverifiable marketing hyperbole. It must be both brief and detailed. Pages should be brief enough to capture the attention of the prospect surfing the Internet aisles for a solution, and yet enable a prospect to drill deeper when they are ready to know more about your solution.
People want to do business with an authority in the field
They want to know that the company they have chosen to work with is a safe choice and a leader in the market. Listing your credentials, years in business, and memberships in trade associations, Chamber of Commerce, and the Better Business Bureau help clients know you’re for real.
Keep the noise down
Getting noticed at a large trade show was almost always a problem, but you didn’t want your booth to become a circus act either. While giving away tee shirts and hawking your products over a megaphone might generate a lot of traffic, in my experience, the “show” detracts from your message and rarely translates into sales. The same is true for your website. A site that is overly busy with too many colors, icons, buttons, and animated gifs, can be confusing and detract from your message.
Don’t clutter your Home Page
Your home page should briefly describe what you sell and who you market to. Divide other content into logical sections and let each page do its job. When people search, they will enter on the page that most relates to the topic they are researching and your website will rank better in the search engines.
See: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell
I don’t design websites, but I work with many local designers who can help you with this important part of your marketing effort.
I am attending the search optimization and marketing conference SMX West in Santa Clara next week. If you will be at the conference and would like to get together, drop me a note. For my customers, this is one of the larger industry events. While I follow in the neighborhood of 20 blogs on marketing and optimization all year, this show does a lot to pull all the information together. Confirming trends and many times is the launching point for new techniques and information.
Last year Google said that load times would become a factor in determining your page rank. I have been toying with Joomla load times trying to speed things up and found two things that are very effective (and easy):
The sites I have on godaddy have had no issues with these changes and I have measured significant improvements in load times.
More technical details can be found here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
To test performance, I recommend using a combination of Firebug and Page Speed plug-ins in Firefox.
I am still investigating ways to speed up WordPress, if you have some recommendations let me know!
I have written several posts on Quality Score, but I recently found two articles on the subject that make it worth revisiting. Quality Score is Google’s way of assessing how relevant your paid search keywords are to the searchers you’re targeting.
This article by by Craig Danuloff discusses in monetary terms what the real costs of a low-quality-score are and this recent article, also by by Danuloff suggests 5 Steps to Improve Your Quality Score.
This is very cool and while it wouldn’t be appropriate for every ad, there are places were this could be very helpful. Sitelinks enable you to link to multiple services within a single ad. Imagine company listings for a business like My SEO firm with direct links to services like Search Optimization, Internet Marketing, and Website Audits. I am not sure how this will play into Google’s quality score algorithm, but I am sure this aspect hasn’t been overlooked. The downside, it only works when your ad is in the top-most spot:
This image from RustyBrick:
Here’s where the sitelinks are added in the campaign settings:
Increasingly people are going on-line, not only for phone number and addresses, but for reviews and recommendations. Website’s not only give you the opportunity to list the standard phonebook info like you’re address, when you’re open and years in business, but also detailed information and photos about your products and services. You can explain who you are and why someone should do business with you. You can post videos not only about your company, but about the work you have performed and of happy customers.
Even my wife, who shunned the digital world including email until a couple of years ago, now spends many hours on-line. As for me, the only time I go to the phonebook is for an older company that I think might not have a web site, and even then, I will go to an online phonebook first.
This article lists the results of a recent study and highlights where people are going for local business information, The article also chronicles the shifts that have occurred over the last three years. http://searchenginewatch.com/3635350
If the phonebook isn’t dead, it is fading fast.
Yahoo announced at the SMX East conference yesterday that they were no longer using meta keywords. In the report Yahoo stated that they had announced this earlier in the year - but apparently no one outside Yahoo got the memo. While none of the major engines now support meta keywords, I still recommend using topic and category specific keywords in all your pages. There are a lot of spiders crawling the web that still use this information to categorize your content and can result in back-links to your site.
