by Nate Tennant,
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UNITED STATES, Oct 10 — Have you taken a good, hard look at your website lately? Does it reflect your business and your strategic goals? Does it really address the needs of your target audience, telling them in a clear, concise way how your products or services can help them?The simple fact of the matter is that your website is your shop. It is your window to the outside world, and in order to truly compete (and hopefully excel) in a market full of competent players, you have to make sure your website sells your business well. You might have put a great deal of work into your website when it was first launched, but when was the last time you looked at it to make sure it was still meeting your needs? Optimizing your web presence is not a one shot deal; it requires continual examination to make sure that you have a dynamic website that reflects both the changing needs of your company, and the changing needs of your customers. Optimize Agency has years of experience in website design
H
ave you taken a good, hard look at your website lately? Does it reflect your business and your strategic goals? Does it really address the needs of your target audience, telling them in a clear, concise way how your products or services can help them?
The simple fact of the matter is that your website is your shop. It is your window to the outside world, and in order to truly compete (and hopefully excel) in a market full of competent players, you have to make sure your website sells your business well. You might have put a great deal of work into your website when it was first launched, but when was the last time you looked at it to make sure it was still meeting your needs? Optimizing your web presence is not a one shot deal; it requires continual examination to make sure that you have a dynamic website that reflects both the changing needs of your company, and the changing needs of your customers. Consider the following areas:
How are visitors interacting with your site?
You are actually sitting on top of a treasure chest of information that is extremely relevant to optimizing your site’s design: your existing website statistics. These statistics tell you everything from where your visitors live, to which pages they visit and how long they stay there. Such information is crucial to designing a site that meets your target group’s needs. It can also tip you off to changes in the needs of your key target audiences. For example, if you experience a shift in the number of visitors to a particular section of your site, say, an increased interest in a particular product or service your company offers, it could point to a growing need for this type of service. You can address this spike by adding more content around this service, or by giving it more prominence in the site’s menu structure. While it might seem obvious, we see companies every day who have this information at their fingertips, yet fail to take it into account when designing their websites.
Is your site easy to navigate?
Best practices in Website Design can hardly be overrated. While innovation and creativity are crucial aspects of building a website, you don’t want to deviate so far from the mainstream that your users will not recognize what you expect them to do. When developing your site, be sure to take into consideration:
• Search function – Users are now fully-conditioned searchers. Statistics show that almost half of Internet users use search engines. These numbers reflect an increasing trend and an expectation of being able to search a site to find the desired information. Take this trend into account in your site structure by making sure the Search function is visible and that it covers all aspects of your site. • Menu structure – This is where it can really go wrong. All too often companies allow internal naming conventions and anecdotal understandings to dictate their websites’ menu structures. Just because the person who handles HR also handles Product Management doesn’t mean that the Careers section should be under the Our Products section. Study the Web and use the existing standards as your starting off point. There will be plenty of opportunities for creativity in your site’s graphical design.
Is your site visible?
While opinions regarding Google’s search market dominance are often less than favorable, the fact remains that they do dominate the search market. So, regardless of whether you were a staunch Lycos-supporter, you have to take their standards into consideration when optimizing your site, if you want to appear in search rankings. How much time and money to invest in this venture really depends on your business. Again, this is where a good understanding of your existing website’s statistics will come in handy. Find out:
• How much of your existing traffic comes from search engines? • What keywords are people searching for when they come to your site? • How do your competitors rank on search engine results? • What’s your existing search engine ranking on the keywords you have identified? It’s important to be balanced in your approach. If only 10% of your website traffic comes from search engines, it might not be worth investing in search engine optimization to come up in the rankings. If you’re a niche player, you might be better served by raising awareness of some highly specialized keywords that are unique to your business, rather than trying to be number one on very generic terms.
Optimize Agency – helping you optimize your web presence
If you’ve been looking at the same website for a considerable amount of time, you might not be able to identify the areas where it could be optimized. It’s a simple fact that the more you look at something, the less you see. That’s where we come in. Optimize Agency has years of experience in website design. Learn more about how our Web Consultancy Services can benefit your company.
Communicate directly with Nate Tennant, the author of this article. Ask questions, send suggestions, comments, engage in conversation, or perhaps you would like to submit a project.
Click Here to ask a question, send a comment, or proposal.
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