Business Websites: Understanding and Improving Your Performance

The world has gone digital mad! From my perspective, this is great, I love what I do and love helping my clients get on the proverbial ‘digital’ ladder with their business. For some, this might feel a bit daunting so I have decided to put together this short guide to understanding and improving your performance on your business website. Whether you are just starting out with your website or have let your old website get stale over the years, this one is for you, let’s dive in.

Is Your Website Underperforming?

There are many reasons your website might be underperforming including outdated content, poor user experience, lack of strategy, bad design or even that it hasn’t been updated in a few years. Luckily, all these things are reversible and with a bit of work, you can turn your website around, delight your customers and boost your business.

Here are some tips to understand and boost the impact of your website!

Set Your Objectives

Before you build a new website or attempt to fix the performance on your old one, you need to know where you are going and what you want to achieve. What is the purpose of your website? Would you like to open an online shop or just create a place your audience can learn more about who you are and what you do? Do you want to incorporate email marketing or social media into your website and create a smooth integration between them or do you just need a contact form where people can make an enquiry? Think about what you really want to get out of having a website in a way that makes sense to your business.

Check Out Your Competitors

If you have direct competitors, it’s well worth having a look at their website and seeing what they are doing (or rather, not doing) to see if you can differentiate your business from them. What makes your business better? What’s your USP? (Unique Selling Point) Why should customers choose you? Identify what makes you different and plan to include it in some way on your website. How can you stand out? What makes you you and your business yours? I’ve just thrown lots of questions at you. Go back and read them again and see which one sinks in.

Build a Strategy

So, you know now what you want to achieve and how you can do things differently from your competitors, it’s now time to build a strategy to make your end goal happen. How will you get visitors to your website? How can you persuade them to buy when they get there? What kind of content is valuable to them? Do they want to see blogs? Heavy imagery? Do they need more resources to help them decide? This is the point where your objectives and everything on your website will link to what you do and how you can help your customers. Ok, more questions I know! However, by now you should hopefully start to be thinking a little differently.

Discover What’s Wrong

A lot of what can go wrong with websites is at the back end so you will need to investigate what’s happening there. Do you have a slow loading website? Broken links? A contact form without a send button? As minor as these things sound, they will all have a huge impact on your business, or lack of it. You can test your website from a user perspective by browsing the buttons and links on your website but if you aren’t comfortable making major changes to the software on your website, I would recommend speaking with a professional web designer.

Create Relevant Content

Finally, we are getting to the good part, creating relevant content for your website users! How well do you know them? What do they want to see? Have you noticed any popularity patterns over on social media you could tie into your website to attract more visitors? There are so many ways you can add valuable content to your website, it’s time to get creative.

Whether you are trying to fix an underperforming website, you need a fresh set of eyes to create content for your business or you would like to start over and build a brand new website, my many years of experience in the digital space can help you. If you would like to discuss this further, please contact me here.