When Was The Last Time You Used Your Own Website?
You might wonder why you need to use your own website, after all, that's for your customers.You already know all about your product or service, and you don't need to purchase it from yourself! Yes, your website is for your customers, but it's representing you and your business, so you need to keep a careful eye on what its saying and how that message is coming across. Imagine you're a customer looking for your product, what would you want to see on a website? What would you want to know? It can be helpful to put yourself in someone else's shoes and view your website through their eyes, or ask a friend to be a potential customer and get the unbiased insight someone else can provide.
Getting an outside perspective on your website and how it works is vital if you are to keep your site fresh and enticing for customers. Out-dated pictures, broken links and old information are potential red flags that you're not on the ball and this can deter customers from doing business with you, so a regular audit is an important task, even if it's just a quick monthly scan to check for typos and broken links. A full website audit forms the basis of a successful online marketing campaign, because if the site people are being driven to isn't user friendly and fully functional you may as well have directed them straight to a competitor.
We understand it can be hard to separate yourself from your business enough to conduct a fully impartial website audit and it's one of the services we offer.We don't just look at the obvious things; we also consider the experience of the users as they go through the site from a landing page to making a purchase or enquiry.We look at the search engine optimisation that has been done and how that can be improved, and we look at the technical and structural aspects of a website that allow it to be visible to search engines and easy for users to navigate.We also assess the construction and the loading time of your site – some older sites have quite clunky coding, or rely on programming languages which don't mesh well with modern browsers.If your page doesn't load properly, or it takes too long, people will look elsewhere.
We can assess the quality of your content and suggest improvements and additions which make it more user-friendly and enticing to customers – how they feel about using your website directly influences how they feel about using your company, so it's really important to make your website visitors feel confident in your ability to serve their needs.The term “content” on your website encompasses not only the words, but the pictures and link buttons, sidebars or other navigational tools.Your content has to reflect your business – a brand selling personalised trainers to a young demographic could have bright colours, animated graphics showing the shoes from all angles and multiple calls to action because that fits with the brand.Taking the same approach for business accountancy services isn't going to make the right impression, so it's vital that your website says the right things about you through the look and feel of the site as well as its navigability.
If this has got you thinking then why not spend an hour going through your website really considering how your customers go about using it.This can be difficult – you know exactly which pages to go to for certain things but your customers don't, and separating this out in your head can be hard.Ask a new employee or a friend to look through your website and give their opinions for a fresh perspective, or get in touch with us for a full service website audit, where we'll look at absolutely everything through our professional and experienced eyes.
