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February 2020

Is Your Website Serving Your Customers Well? How to Know & What to Do

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As a busy entrepreneur, you don’t have time for time-wasting do-overs. You really need to get it right – whatever “it” happens to be from one moment to the next – the first time.

This includes trusting your employees. For example, you simply can’t be there every second to make sure your workers are taking great care of your company’s customers. You have to train them and then trust them.

This can be a tough balance to maintain!

The same holds true for your website, which is basically your online staff. Is your website doing a great job inviting current and potential customers to browse what you have to offer? Is it greeting people warmly – the way you would greet them if you were there personally?

Is your website giving them the red-carpet VIP tour, advising them of all the latest specials and making a plan to keep in touch? When your website serves your customers and prospects well, there is a much stronger chance they will be back.

If it doesn’t, you can bet they will take their business somewhere else...and likely for good.

How to Know When Your Website Needs a Facelift

Approximately 81 percent of customers go online before they make a purchase decision.

Take a look at your website and ask yourself, “If I were shopping online, would I shop on my site?”

Perhaps right about now you are thinking, “I don’t think my website is that great, but I don’t have money to do lots of expensive Google ads to bring people to us.”

Guess what? You don’t have to place pricey ads to generate more traffic! What you DO NEED to do is first make sure that if new visitors find you online, they will want to stick around and shop with you.

This is called “website optimization.”

It is what most websites need more of, so if your website has it, you are way ahead of the bell curve and much more likely to generate what is called “organic traffic,” which is the biggest generator of new business anyway.

So let’s talk about how to do this without having to invest a small fortune to make it happen.

Understanding Organic Versus Paid Website Traffic

Have you ever watched one of those televised awards shows where the stars show up on the red carpet and just look flawless?

They make it so easy to look perfect. But behind the scenes is another story. They might have spent all day, all week or even all year working up to that one big spotlight moment. The investment will be worth it if the cameras decide to turn in their direction.

But not all red-carpet stars get front-page features the morning after. The reporters choose of their own free will who to photograph, video, interview and feature.

This is the principle of organic website traffic in a nutshell.

Your website shows up. Your customers decide of their own free will whether to give you their attention or turn toward your competitors’ websites instead.

It is your job to make your website look flawless, effortless, perfect, to attract and hold your customers’ attention.

This means it is a misnomer to say that organic website traffic is “non-paid” traffic.

It is paid for in terms of how much time and energy and investment you put into your website behind the scenes. But once launched and visible online, a well-designed, optimized website will generate inbound traffic – new site visitors – without any help from Google Ads.

In fact, the most recent 2020 statistics tell us that up to 80 percent of people who use the internet to research or shop ONLY look at organic search results (i.e., they ignore the paid ads that pop up at the top, bottom and sides of their browser window).

How to Optimize Your Website to Get More Organic Traffic

The first step to optimizing your website is to identify where you are now and where you want to go. This is often the hardest step because it involves gathering data, analyzing that data and making sense of it to create goals.

Unless your business is website design or online marketing, you probably want to bring in an expert to help with this.

A five-star optimized website 

  1. is rich in SEO (search engine optimized) keywords

  2. is responsive and interactive on multiple platforms (mobile and voice search-friendly)

  3. is optimized for local SERP results (SERP – search engine results pages, i.e., local organic traffic via Google, Yelp, etc.).

  4. makes full use of email signup, social media, webinars and freebies to collect prospective customer data and begin building that relationship.

A website that is optimized to perform in these four areas is like a trusted worker you don’t have to micro-manage.

They are “you” when you are busy elsewhere. They are so good at their job you might just award them “Employee of the Month” or even “Employee of the Year!”

Getting your website to this point represents the bulk of the behind-the-scenes workload required to capture more organic traffic, or more visitors to your website.

Once you start to see results, with more online eyes turning your way, then the rest is simply about refinement, making small adjustments and tweaks to continue to improve your online marketing results.

Get in Touch

Are you ready to turn your business website into your online Employee of the Year? We can help!

Read our local business case studies to learn more about the kind of transformation that is possible with a professionally optimized business website.

Contact us online or give us a call at 613-969-0626.

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