Most business owners know improving website traffic and user experience directly improves online business success. Instinctively they know a better B2B or B2C website enhances a company’s bottom line. But exactly how the magic of improving a website happens, is not as well known.
Here are three tips for getting the most out of your business’s website.
1. Align Your Website with Business Goals
Websites are their most powerful when aligned with company goals. Business goals widely vary and can include, lead generation, customer service, ecommerce, subscriptions, generating awareness, and more. A great website is one that supports your back office and business goals, making it easier to do more and better business.
Understanding and documenting your goals is your first step. Once complete, with a critical eye, review your website to see how it complements your business goals. Perhaps you’ll find your business goals are not reflected within your website. Or maybe you’ll discover a better way something could be done.
Questions you might ask for your review:
- Is it easy for website visitors to find contact information?
- Is it easy to find service or product information?
- Does my website give visitors a quick way to get to the information I want them to see?
- Are my website’s call-to-actions appropriately aligned with my goals? Could the language be better? (note: click here as your linked text is always a clue your site can be better)
- Do we have the appropriate content on the website to support sales or customer service?
To summarize, the first step is to document your goals and then assess how your website supports your goals.
2. Define Quarterly Website Goals & Then Measure and Track It
With your business goals defined and aligned within your website, it’s important to track your success and your room for improvement. In this way, you can keep on doing what works, as well as fix what isn’t working.
If you don’t already have analytics code on your website, install it. We recommend Google Analytics – it’s free (for most) and powerful. Assuming you have had the code installed for a while, document your baseline metrics.
Baseline metric examples:
- How many total website visitors are you getting per day or month?
- Note specific pages/URLs of interest and then document monthly visitors to those pages .
- How many forms are getting submitted per month?
- If your aim is to reduce calls to customer service, track the number of calls as well as the number of page views to online help .
Tracking (and following up on) important website business metrics allows you to create a continuous improvement loop. A quarterly review will allow you to understand and respond to trends. However, for a quicker response to your market, you may decide to review your metrics and take action monthly.
3. Remember: It’s All About Your Customers
Many companies talk about themselves and how great their products or services are at doing X, Y, & Z. A better tact is to chat up the benefits, in the ‘what’s in it for me’ (WIIFM) perspective. Writing website content from your customers’ needs, requirements, and ‘pain points’ perspective shows you understand them. Website visitors naturally find more credibility and trustworthiness when a company speaks about value, benefits, and results.
Website visitors want to know how your products or services will benefit them. They don’t care as much about the features of your products or services so much as they want to know WIIFM.
My all-time favorite example is the car salesperson talking about the cool specs of the supercharged V8 engine. The customer could not have cared less. The salesperson starts talking about how fast and safe the car gets up to speed while getting on the highway, and you have the sale. They translated the powerful engine feature into value for the customer.
Clearly, life is more complicated, but people still want to know how their lives will be better with your product or service. Tell them all about it, but from a lens that helps them to intrinsically understand how they will win better, more, or faster.
For the B2B company, good content could be demos, videos, or ‘how to’ guides. You may want to create white papers. Offer good information and your customers will come back time and time again.
Web Design Tip Wrap Up
There is plenty more to know about maximizing your website’s potential. But if you start with understanding your business goals and how your website can better direct customers, you’ll have a heads up on the competition. Tracking your key performance indicators then allows you to keep your company on an upward trajectory, beating your own records time and time again.
Happy website designing!
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