Treat your website like an employee!

It’s far too easy to think of your website as a brochure or a glorified business card, and little else. Those businesses who treat their website as a shop window will surely see the importance of keeping the window display fresh and have up-to-date contact details easily available. But frankly, the role of a website can be so much more than just a static display in the cloud.

You should treat your website as an employee.

Think about it. An employee who deals directly with your customers should always look smart and be able to sell your services succinctly and effectively to anyone they may meet. They need to be approachable and easy for potential clients to get on with. Most of all, they need to add value to your business, helping to raise profits to ensure it was worth hiring them in the first place.

Why not consider applying the same criteria to your website?

Whilst many companies will spend thousands on recruitment agency fees, or HR departments, to be sure of finding the right employee, the website is often just an afterthought, despite the impact, it can have on clients, sales, and the bottom line. Indeed it’s sometimes relegated to the status of something knocked up quickly and cheaply purely to say ‘yes, we have a website.’

Having a website just isn’t good enough in today’s world. You need to have a site that actively works to promote your business.

How does it do that? By being part of a planned online marketing strategy, by being usable and accessible across platforms (over 80% of users will be searching for the first time using a mobile device), and by providing valuable information quickly to the surfer.

The average attention span of your website users will vary depending on who they are and the type of content being presented to them, but as a general rule, according to surveys by Google and Microsoft, the average attention span for a website user is less than eight seconds. That’s not very long and if your content isn’t engaging, your readers will quickly get bored and leave.

Reasons people leave your website

Within the first few seconds of landing on your site- a visitor will make a couple of really important decisions, almost without thinking about it. The first thing they’ll decide is. ‘Is this for me?’ in other words, ‘have I found what I was looking for?’ The second thing that will determine whether or not they click away, is ‘Can I trust them?’

So almost instantly they have made up their minds to hang around on your page, or skip on to the next website – which will most likely be that of a competitor. You know that this is the way things work because it’s how you search online yourself!

This means that you need to make sure that everything on your site makes it crystal clear what you do, offer or sell, in less than a few seconds or they’ll be gone before reading anything else.

Anything that gets in the way of these primary objectives needs careful evaluation. Big fancy images, slow loading video, and long-winded text will just add to the bloat on your site. Yes, there’s a place for them – but not on your landing pages! The primary objective of these pages is to get the surfer to stay long enough to read the headline content. and the objective of the headline is to move the surfer into the main site area.

Of course the above doesn’t even apply to websites that are slow to load, or don’t display correctly on a mobile device – they are out of the running before the race has even started. you can check your site speed for free here.

Your site should also, where applicable, give surfers an easy way for users to purchase your product (why phone you up if they could buy online in a few clicks) and most of all it needs to convey your brand values and establish trust with a user who may have stumbled across the site from a search engine result.

Fresh Content Matters

Good sites, those that feature high in google rankings, and as a consequence get lots of visitors, also tend to be the ones that have freshly updated, and relevant content. If an employee didn’t change their socks for two weeks, you’d soon notice!

A website too should always be fresh. This doesn’t mean a complete redesign, it could be a new article or news byte going up once a week, just to let prospective customers know that your business is thriving. Nothing quite tells a story of decline better, than ‘news’ articles that are several years out of date.

If a website is sloppy, unusable, basic and doesn’t do it’s job, then like any bad employee, it may be time to fire it.

Very often, just as with any employee it can be more efficient to make a fresh start.

A well-thought-out website that is nurtured, maintained, and constantly improved can, like any good employee, continue to add value to your business for years to come.

Remember the website acting as your employee should be acting as your ‘silent salesman’ 24 hours a day 7 days a week every day of the year, needing no holiday pay, maternity benefits, sick pay, holiday, or weekends off.

Treat this employee well and the results will speak for themselves.

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