Is Your Website Still Delivering?

Do you know what you want to achieve with your website?

For most organizations, it seems a given that you need a website.

But it’s not enough to just build one from there. You need goals—both for your overall website, and for each page on there.

Are you trying to build awareness? Are you trying to sell online? Do you want people to get in touch with you?

As with any marketing, sometimes we start out with really good, clear goals, and those start to fade over time.

So, your challenge:

• If you didn’t have clear goals for your website, it’s time to set some!
• If you did have clear goals, take a look at your website and its performance and see if what you’re doing is still meeting those goals. It might be that you need to change a few things up—either updating those goals, or updating your website.

Have you written for your audiences?

You know what makes your organization great. And you know what you want to achieve with your website (that is, if you’ve addressed step one!).

But the people you really need to reach, persuade and delight are your visitors. After all, they’re the ones who’ll help you achieve your goals.

• The first step in that is understanding who your audiences are. A great way to achieve that is by writing personas—fictional representations of your customers based on research. If you haven’t written up some of those, we highly recommend you give it a shot. (We can take you through the process if you’d like a little help.)
• Next step: look through your existing website content and ask yourself if it’s really meeting those audiences’ needs. Every page on your website should give someone in your audience something of value. Every page is an opportunity to help you achieve your goals.

Is your website mobile-friendly?

If you’re in the office, you probably look at your website on a desktop computer.

But that’s probably not how your customers are looking at it. They’re looking at it in their palm of their hand: yep, a smartphone.

Most websites designed and launched in the past few years offer a decent mobile experience. But to really meet your audiences' expectations, you need a great mobile experience.

• Take a look at your website analytics and find out what proportion of your visitors are on mobile. That'll start to give you an idea of how important your mobile experience could be.
• Test your current website on various mobile devices (different operating systems, different sizes, different manufacturers, different browsers). Note down any places where the experience isn't optimal, such as slow load times, text getting cut off, or images positioned where they shouldn't be.
• Think about whether you're providing the right level of information, presented in the right way. If you're looking at a website on a phone, you might not have a whole lot of time to find the information you need. Make it concise. Make it obvious.

Is your search engine optimization in order?

You might have beautiful copy and imagery. You might have a beautiful mobile experience. You might have pages that fully support your business goals, and a website that speaks directly to your audiences.

But that can all be for nothing if those audiences can't find it.

That's why SEO - search engine optimization - is so important.

• Carry out keyword research. That's finding out the search words and phrases that people use to find businesses like yours.
• Make sure each page's copy is optimized for those search words and phrases.
• Ensure each page has a meta title and meta description - and that they're also optimized for your search words and phrases.
• Make sure each page provides content that's of good value to your audiences. It's one of the most important parts of securing good page rankings!

Are your systems talking well with each other?

Your website is more than just a static broadcast system. Set up properly, it'll tell you a lot about your audiences, and allow you to cater to them more effectively via your other marketing channels.

• Set up Google Analytics. There's probably a good chance you've already done that - but make sure! And if you have, think about whether you're reviewing that analytics data as well as you could be, and using the insights accordingly.
• That also goes for Google Tag Manager.
• Integrate social media tracking pixels. They're available for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and allow you to get the most out of your social media accounts and audiences.
• Integrate your customer relationship management (CRM) system. With a good CRM in place, you can get a much better idea of who your customers are and how they interact with what you share. With that information, you can do a much better job of meeting their needs, and understanding how you can achieve your goals more effectively.