When everything is going wrong with your website, your business suffers. You may be in need of a major overhaul, just a few tweaks, or somewhere in between. It all depends on where you started, where you are now and where you intend to go. You do have goals, right? If you don’t, that’s your first problem. But let’s look at the big picture. When you’re not getting the results you expect from your website, you have to figure out what you’re doing wrong. Don’t jump to conclusions! Take a comprehensive look at everything you’re doing and not doing.
An aside to small business owners who don’t have a website: Get one. It’s necessary. You’ve waited too long.
Reason #1. Website Flaws
If your website is difficult to navigate, has typos, missing images, broken links and is an all around mess, fix it. You may not even realize how bad it is because you’re accustomed to looking at your website. Ask a few people to click around your site and give you their honest opinion. Take the feedback seriously and implement the necessary changes. Write fresh content on a regular basis. A blog page is one the easiest ways to add content. Hire someone to manage your website if you can’t or won’t do it yourself. It’s money well spent.
Reason #2. SEO Shortfall
Nearly seven years in the SEO reseller business and I continue to be surprised by the number of business owners who still think that once their website is live, it’s done. Your website is not an item you can just cross of your to-do list once it’s built. Your website does nothing for lead generation or sales if no one can find it. Sure, people who know about your business may search for it by name and find your website but otherwise, it’s invisible without SEO. Getting your website found on Google search requires SEO. If you’re making no effort to generate good content on and off your website and earn links to your website (in spite of what you may have heard, links still matter), your website is not going to be worth the money you paid for it. Learn how to do SEO and pay attention to the latest Google updates. Be warned: Do-it-yourself SEO is not for the small business owner who doesn’t have the time to take on another full time job–SEO is a full time job! If you know nothing about SEO, you’ll spend the next several years of your life trying to figure it all out. Those of us in the SEO reseller business spend more time than we’d like monitoring the news from Google and figuring out how and when to change course. It’s a treadmill that you really don’t want to be on. Most small businesses outsource SEO to a professional. Again, money well spent.
Reason #3. Tracking Deficiencies
Tools exist to track just about everything that leads potential customers to your site and everything that happens once they land on your site. A good SEO reseller company will track the keywords that are sending traffic to your site, phone calls from SEO and online marketing campaigns, web leads, sales and so on. Cautionary Tale: A small business owner was running a pay per click campaign but only tracking web leads, not phone calls. The cost per lead was more than they wanted to spend so they shut down the campaign. The phone stopped ringing. Not completely but call volume dropped significantly. It was only then that they realized the PPC campaign was responsible for a large percentage of phone calls. Had they been using phone call tracking, they would have realized their cost per lead was far lower than it seemed. Tracking is the only way to know what’s really working for you, and what’s not.
Reason #4. Content Marketing, Social Media and Everything Else
If you’re not producing high quality onsite content, posting guest blogs, putting out press releases, producing video blogs for your website and YouTube, sharing everything on your social media pages, then get out of your very small box and look around. Online marketing is a bit of a moving target. Things come and go, some stick, some don’t. Social media is not a passing phase. Neither is content marketing. Video blogging is a newer approach to content marketing and believe it or not, some online marketers swear that video blogging is easier than writing a blog. The important message here is to push your content out via every available avenue. Make the largest footprint you can on the world wide web!
Does this all seem obvious? If so, good for you. You are way ahead of many small businesses. If you’re one of the 55 percent of small business owners who don’t have a website, the good news is, it’s not too late. Today is a good day to get started.
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