How's your website going? No, seriously. You need to know the answer.
My mum used to have a habit of thinking something in her head and then asking me or my siblings a question out loud, as if we had also been privy to her mind’s conversation.
We would laugh about it at times, and, the older I get the more I find myself doing it. Thinking about something and then asking, say, my husband or my son, “Do you think that’s [note, he has zero idea what "that" is] what we should do?”.
While you may have never done this, a similar thing happens ALL the time in business when it comes to websites. We do all this work behind the scenes (with an agency, a friend, a solo web dev or just ourselves) then somehow think that visitors to our store or site just magically, “know” what to do.
Of course they know that “Insights” means “Blog”.
Everyone knows iPhone covers sit under Accessories not Tech.
Isn’t it obvious that our services (rather than job opportunities) sit under “Work With Us”?
When was the last time you asked someone unrelated to your business to find something on your website? When was the last time you watched someone physically search for something on their phone or iPad? When was the last time you tracked the full customer journey with an actual customer?
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We are headed into what is the busiest time of the year for many small brands (product and service-based alike). Dasera, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, Boxing Day, EOY and New Year sales and summer / winter get-togethers have a dramatic impact on the sales of small biz. Even if you’re a service-based business and find the end of year a quieter time in terms of in-person work, there are always opportunities for sales aligned with “new year, new you” or “2021 goals”. From online allied health events through to services related to fitness and losing weight, the end / start of a year can mean big business.
And many of the beginnings of these sales — especially in 2020 — will begin online.
· How is your website performing right now? Which metrics do you use to signify success?
· Do you know how people use your site?
· Do you know which pages they usually land on first? Which ones do they travel to next?
· Where do you get the highest bounce-off rates? (And what might you do to help "save" customers from leaving without taking an action?)
· Which pages provide the highest conversion rates?
· Which ones are ranking well for your top keywords?
· Where are you taking people to? Does every page have a clear call-to-action or are you leading people to, effectively, dead ends?
· Do you know which terms / keywords are helping them even find your site?
· Are you regularly tracking any of this?
If you tensed up around any of those questions, consider blocking out time — even an hour or two — in the next fortnight to dig into these questions. Tools like Hot Jar, fullstory and Clicktail can show you how people are using your site. Sites like Hubspot's Website Grader can show you where you could be improving your site's usability, and a site like Ahrefs can show you a whole lot of things, including where your site sits compared to your competitors, which content on your site performs best and tactics to help with optimising your site.
I check my own site about twice month in terms of these things and, like a lot of other people in lockdown with kids home 24/7, it’s been hard to find the time to fix everything of late. But, even updating a few things or making small tweaks can do wonders in helping meet the brand promise you want to be known for as well as increasing trust and conversion.
You want your customers to understand what you’re about and how their life might just be improved with your product or service. And no time of year is more important than now to be conversing with them through your website. By regularly making time to check what's working, what's not and what they most want from your site, it's more likely you'll meet their needs and come through the next quarter better off. And, if you're tempted to leave this one for later, consider a physical store or venue. Imagine if they changed absolutely nothing for the last three months of the year? Your website is your venue. Take a little time to make it a great experience for anyone who visits.