Do Your Homework

Yesterday I spoke with a client who has spent $36,000.00 and counting on his website. Yikes! It’s been up and running for over a year and he still isn’t even capturing visitor information when they come by and poke around. BIGGER YIKES!!!

One of the most common frustrations I hear from clients is this: “ I have a website, but I’m just not happy with it.”

“Why not”, I say.

“Well, I just don’t feel like it’s doing what it could be and should be doing. I feel like it’s missing some key elements. And I see my competitors sites and they seem to be getting better results than mine.”

You see a common mistake most business owners make right out of the gate is thinking, “I just need to get a website up as soon as possible. As soon as I get my website up and running, the customers will start coming in.” Unfortunately, that’s just not the way it is. That kind of thinking can get you into a lot of trouble. Here’s why:

Just because a website looks great, doesn’t mean it has all of the components necessary to make it a functional site.

Here are some questions you should know the answer to if you have a site or are about to get one built:

1.)A flashy, fancy website may look great, but is it optimized to send traffic to you?

2.)Does your website have a way of capturing information from prospective clients/customers?

3.)Is your website user-friendly?

4.)Do you have analytics so that you know how many visitors come to your website per day, month or year?

5.)Of those visitors that are coming, how many of them are converting to leads?

6.)Of those that convert to leads, how many are converting to clients/customers?

7.)Does the design of you website potentially make it unfindable? It’s true that some website designs actually turn Google off, or aren’t able to even be seen by Google. (Flash sites in particular have a very difficult time being picked up by the search engines.)

8.)Is your website supported by Social Media?

These questions are all very important to ask, but most business owner’s heads just spin when they start hearing the web jargon. The biggest take away from this is: DO NOT race out to get a website up thinking that just having a site is enough. Don’t just buy a templated site from some cookie-cutter online source because it’s “cheap”, “pretty”, or because they tout on their website that they “can get you on the first page of Google in 10 minutes”. Do you homework and ask the right questions. You may be surprised what you find out.

-Brian