Web Content

When developing your website, keep this phrase in mind “Content is King”.  Relevant, updated content is what the search engines are looking for and will help visitors find your site.  When developing your content you need to try to think about your customer’s point of view – why are they on your site and what are they hoping to accomplish? The natural tendency is to tell customers about the product – it’s a great product and you should buy it!  It’s more difficult and takes some thought to develop your content in terms of your customers needs first and then showing them how your product/service meets their needs.   You need to understand what your visitors are searching for and how much ‘education’ they will need before they are comfortable purchasing. 

Here are two content tips that everyone with a website should consider:

1.       Build content with a blog – When you have your blog on your site and were to only blog once a week, at the end of the year you would add 52 pages of content.  Every week the search engines will ‘credit’ your site with new content.  What to blog about?  This is what takes time and depends on your business. Every business can provide updates, tips and how to utilize products for increased productivity, etc.

2.        Provide FREE information to your visitors.  This information can be in the form of e-books, check lists, white papers or industry happenings.  By being a resource for information you build a relationship with clients providing them with valuable information and establishing your expertise. 

Web Analytics

As previously mentioned online marketing is relatively easy to track and you can understand what specifics of your online campaign are driving results and quickly make adjustments to your program.  It’s important to make sure that you know what your objectives are and to set benchmarks to measure against.  You need to track is trends and not independent data points. When tracking trends you need to know what happened, why it happened and then know what actions you should take based on the information. 

Common tracking points include:

Web Usability

Web usability is a simple concept and often is not implemented well.  The concept is that your site should instantly communicate your value proposition and be easy for visitors to navigate and accomplish their goals.  Why is this often done poorly?  Because when you are developing your site you forget that what is obvious to you, may not be obvious to a visitor.  You need to have an outside opinion of someone not involved in the development of the site – ask them to perform a couple of simple actions to determine if they can perform the tasks that ultimately lead to a sale.  Another reason usability is sometimes lacking is that people become design oriented at the expense of functionality.  In 95% of cases a functional web site will deliver greater results than one that may have great design but is lacking the basic web standards.

You don’t have to adhere to every web standard, but you should be aware of them and their implications.  Common standards include:

·         Logo in upper left of every page.

·         Search box in upper right – 20-30% of users prefer this type of searching

·         Navigation across the top or on left side

·         Breadcrumbs to tell people where they are and what pages they have been through

·         Testimonials or other trust logos

·         Unique value proposition – FREE offer to help generate leads

·         4 second rule – can users tell what the page is about in 4 seconds?

Other conventions include having the following pages:

·         About

·         Contact

·         News

·         Location(s)

·         Privacy Policy

·         Site Maps

If you want to read up yourself on web usability, I recommend the book Don’t Make Me Think A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug.