Is your website helping your business grow online?

by Otoabasi Umonting Marketing Consultant & Coach

Websites help businesses in a lot of ways, especially when it comes to brand awareness and credibility.

The other important aspects include its ability to attract quality traffic, lead generation, and sales conversions. However, a good number of websites are either sitting dormant (collecting digital dust... with zero fresh content), or they are not doing the heavy lifting for the business, in terms of bringing in more business.

Getting a beautifully designed website is not a bad investment, but if it fails to convert visitors to leads, then it's just a static online brochure (R.O.I. should be considered from day one). Now, for the conversions to happen, it's important for the business to have things like fresh content to engage the visitor, mobile optimisation, good load speed, lead generation elements (e.g. free reports), easy navigation (not 1,000s of menu options to click on), FAQs, etc.

These things may seem irrelevant to some, but they do play an important role in boosting conversions. Most businesses would spend time only looking at their traffic, however, a good metric to track is the number of conversions (sign ups, phone calls, form completions, sales, email queries, etc, depending on what the business is looking to accomplish).

When a business's website is setup to fulfill these things, then one can say that business has a good website. Also, consistent updates (especially on the technical side of things) is important, in order to ensure the website functions as it should.

On a final note, a business's website designed with the visitor in mind is often more effective than ones designed to show off the business. A good number of websites are filled with platitudes such as "best in the city", "trust worthy", "since 1934", etc... which doesn't really add much value to the visitor (these are overused terms). Visitors want answers, and if they find that immediately when they land or a link to click to where to find answers, then it's a jolly good ride to possible conversions.

When this is the primary focus (especially on the homepage), that website stands a better chance of getting that business's phone ringing off the hook or their email inbox flooded with queries.

I didn't expect this post to be this lengthy, but I guess I had to bring them all out ;)