Tag: web design

Four Ways To Ensure Your Website Is A Reflection Of Your Brand

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , , , , ,
Brand website

Some companies are still under the assumption that their corporate brand is simply a matter of a logo, corporate colors, and a font style.

I’ve written articles and produced videos in the past that point out that corporate branding has evolved. You may have already seen or read this information.

In today’s business environment, your brand is far more inclusive. Think of it as your company’s personality.

Branding in this day and age includes every aspect of how your company is perceived by clients and prospects in the marketplace. So, yes logo, colors, font style; all these do matter. But it is far more than that. It is much more about the customer experience.

Rather than rehash the elements of branding that I have discussed in previous posts, today I want to focus on how your website affects your brand.

Although your website is simply one tool for communicating with your clients and prospects, it can be an extremely powerful one. Your online presence is more important than ever, now that most consumers shop and compare products and services using the Internet. Therefore, take the time to create a website that is a true reflection of your corporate values and communicates this important brand messaging to your clients and prospects.

Review your website for these four key elements to ensure that it is properly reflecting your brand identity:

1. Include information that is valuable to your clients and prospects.

First and foremost, be sure that your company’s website is providing content that matters to your clients and prospects. Yes, you want to tell them about you and your services, but remember that what will attract them is what you can do for them. Failing to give visitors what they need and want will only result in a high bounce rate, and you may as well not even have an online presence. Know your target audience, provide information that is relevant to them, and presented in an organized and easy to consume fashion ads a huge amount of value.

2. Include calls to action to engage your site visitors.

Let’s face it, the purpose of having an online presence is to help drive business. And in order to do this, you must include statements within your site that will not only capture the attention of your visitors but will also elicit a response. Using phrases such as “visit us today” could entice a prospect, especially someone on a mobile device, to drop in. Or, perhaps you would like them to sign up to receive notifications of specials that you run from time to time. Be sure to include a simple to use call to action button that will entice visitors to click. And make the form simple, as statistics show that the more information you are soliciting, the lower the opt in rate will be.

3. Make sure your website is interactive.

We have all received brochures or pamphlets that are jam-packed with information. And we all know what we do with those-we throw them out. Poorly designed information, regardless of how valuable it is, will ultimately be discounted and discarded by your prospect. Make sure that your website isn’t cluttered with information. Back to our point about making information easily accessible to site visitors, tried to ensure that you have interactive features for them as well. This can not only make a more individually tailored experience for your visitor, but it can also help to build loyalty to your brand. For example if you are a financial professional, consider including an app such as a calculator that gives your clients and prospects the opportunity to get a clear picture of the services they are seeking.

4. Consider the design of your website.

How your website looks and feels to visitors should reflect the true essence of your brand. Ensure that the logo, colors, font choices are consistent with your overall brand. Your site design should speak to your visitors about your corporate “personality”. Remember what I said at the beginning of this article, and make sure that are everything that you are providing on your website gives clients and prospects a sense of the integrity of your business.

These four tactics are crucial to ensure that your website will optimize your brand identity. As a business owner, you need to take seriously how you project your online presence and how this creates the type of experience you are providing to clients and prospects.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Six Audits To Measure Your Website Performance

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , , , , ,
website audits

Okay, so you’ve got your website out there, but now what?

Chances are that you have done some sort of audit to see how well your website has been performing. We’ve all heard that we should be considering everything from speed of page load to rankings, so you’ve probably found some tests online and have put your website through those. However, in order to get a true picture of your website performance, you should consider more than one type of audit.

Your website is an essential part of your business, and as such needs to be evaluated properly to make sure that it is performing in a way that enhances your online presence.

With this in mind, we wanted to provide you with the following six key areas to consider for your website audit.

1. SEO & Organic Reach Audit

Although the face of SEO has changed over the years, it is still an important factor to consider for your site success. Even if your main focus is not on obtaining clients and prospects through search, it is important that you are not invisible. Therefore, how your website fares in organic search is a major part of a proper website audit. A critical part of making improvements to your site, not only from a strategic perspective but also to find opportunities, is understanding the traffic to your site and the rankings and keywords that deliver this traffic. This audit should provide you with information about what is driving traffic to your site, helping you to plan for further growth.

2. Paid Visibility Audit

Since most organic and paid campaigns are usually run separately from each other, a paid visibility audit is key to understanding if your ad spend is targeting the right keywords. By auditing your website’s paid campaigns, you will gain an insight into what keywords are generating visitors to your site as well as the cost of those visits.

3. Technical Audit

The usability and functionality of your website matters more today than in the past. Not only are users becoming smarter and demanding more from your site, but search engines give preference to websites that are technically sound. This includes such technical elements as page load speed, optimization of images, content to code ratio, etc. And given the importance of mobile responsiveness these days, remember that you must review the technical foundation of your website for both desktop and mobile users.

4. Backlink Profile Audit

We all know that backlinks are important, even if not all of us know exactly what that means or how they work. Learning about the health of your backlinks is often overlooked in a website audit. But the quality and the origin of these links to your website are very important to establish your websites authority, and Google’s ranking algorithm has placed a lot of emphasis on a website’s link profile. But getting authoritative, quality back links has become more and more difficult. Discovering where your own links are coming from can help give you a perspective of just how authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engines.

5. Competitor Audit

Are you looking for a report, or do you want an audit? You can’t have an audit without having something to compare to. When enlisting the services of someone for your website audit, ensure that they include a competitive audit that will allow you to compare your website among your competitors. This may give you awareness of online competitors that you were previously unaware of. It should also give you a better idea of how well you compare among your competitors; understanding how strong their online presence is can help you identify areas to improve your own online presence.

6. Local Audit

It’s important that you have accurate business information available on your website. Lack of information, or wrong information, can cost you business. A local audit shows existing local profiles, and gives you the opportunity to identify any problems that could be turning customers away.

Without question, your website is an important part of your business. Regardless of whether you’re B2B or B2C, a properly functioning website is critical to help acquire and retain customers. By ensuring that your website has been reviewed for these 6 six key elements, you can ensure that your website will perform well and help grow your business.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

How to Make Your Website More User Friendly in 3 Easy Steps

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , , , , , , , , , , ,
web design

There is no arguing that a website is a must for your business.

But if your website isn’t user friendly and is not engaging visitors, you’re wasting your efforts.

Creating and maintaining a site that is pleasing to your visitors will greatly enhance your business by appealing to your existing clients and attracting more business prospects, eventually enhancing your bottom line.

Follow these 3 steps and you should be well on your way to providing a website that is attractive and engaging for your visitors.

1. Keep your content concise, paying close attention to it’s readability.

Content is the biggest influence on visitors to your website. By providing content on a regular basis that is current and easy to read, you are not only making your site more user friendly, but you are also more likely to have your visitors return and share information.

Make sure that your content is easy to peruse. Most internet users scan content rather than reading all of it. Formatting your content by keeping the paragraphs short, using tables or columns will assist in the readability factor. Breaking up text through the use of bullet points, headings and sub-headings will also make it easier for your visitors to find the key points of your message.

Ensuring that your content is provided in a visually pleasing manner will also improve the visitors’ engagement. Watch for things like finding the right contrast between your site and the content. Don’t let the background color overpower the content.

Also pay close attention to white space. Too little, and you risk ‘tiring’ your visitor and they will simply leave your site without reading your message.

Improper font usage is another error that can cause subliminal fatigue in your visitors. Keep your fonts clean and easy to read, and note that san serif fonts are easier to read online, while serif fonts are more appropriate for printed materials. Avoid using more than 2 or 3 fonts per design, using highlighted or bold keywords or links instead.

While we are on the subject of links, be sure to test all your links to ensure that they are working. Broken links are not only confusing but are also unprofessional, making a negative impression and lowering the credibility of the content you worked so hard to provide. Review your links from time to time to make sure that they have not broken and continue to point to the appropriate pages.

2. Make navigating your site simple.

This simple step is one of the easiest and best things you can do to improve the appeal of your site. Creating navigation that is clear and clutter-free makes it easier for your visitors to find information and they are therefore more likely to dig deeper into your site. Limit the number of menu items as much as you can, while still ensuring that visitors can find salient information.

When looking to improve navigation, check your layout first. If the layout is cluttered or confusing, you will lose visitors. You can highlight specific pages to make them more visible, or include a call-to-action at the top of the site.

Also, the placement of the navigation menus are very important, so be strategic. The best place for the menu is either at the top or the left-hand side of your site. Regardless of which of these 2 choices you use, be sure that the navigation is above the fold – keeping in mind the use of mobile devices as well.

3. Be sure your site loads quickly.

The online experience has impacted our attention spans. More and more, visitors are looking to get information quickly, and are impatient with websites with long load times. Don’t risk losing potential business simply because your site takes too long to come up! Your site should ideally load within 4 – 6 seconds. Besides that, long load times also negatively impact search rankings.

Some of the things that slow down your site’s speed are large videos, photos, and flash files. Although multimedia elements can certainly engage a visitor, they take a long time to load, and you risk losing the visitor before they ever get to it. Consider minimizing the use of these elements on your site, and opt to link to them externally from within your site.

When you do use images on your site (and, of course, you should have some visual elements!) compress them for web use and be sure to use the right file type.

Following these pointers will help you keep your site user-friendly and ensure that people come back – as well as share your site with their friends. Your attention to your website is the difference between a ‘so what’ experience for you visitors and a ‘what’s next’ reaction. By taking the time and a little effort, you can achieve great results from your site, turning it into a powerful promoter of your business.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Are Your Website Visitors Engaged?

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
website visitor engagement

Engaging you website visitors.

No, we’re not talking about tying the knot here. Is your website pulling your visitors in and providing them with reasons to explore?

Pretty websites are easy to create. But if the site isn’t engaging visitors, well… is it really worth anything or is it just wasting everyone’s time?

The main purpose for any website that is being used to build and promote a business is to draw visitors in and propel them to interact with the site. Without engagement, your visitors will leave and never come back. You need to give clients and prospects a reason to come back to your site, and the only way to do that is to encourage engagement.

So just how do you get your website visitors to do what you want while they are on your site? By creating a site that encourages engagement. Without engagement, your visitors won’t buy from your site, they won’t share your information about products and services, they won’t sign up for your newsletter, and they certainly won’t come back.

There are lots of ways to increase visitor engagement.

Design and appearance of your site is one important factor. If your site is muddled or too busy, the visual effect will turn visitors away. Clean design is important to make the site welcoming to your clients and prospects.

Be sure to watch your wording. This applies not only to your content, but also to any sign up forms you may have on your site. After all, the best engagement is to capture the names and email addresses of your visitors.  When developing your opt-in’s test the wording. Also, be sure to remove any questions that can be answered ‘no’. Once ‘no’ pops into a prospects head, they will disengage, i.e., leave your website – the exact opposite of your intent.

Another thing you can include on your site to encourage and increase engagement is a blog. Providing interaction with prospects and clients on a regular basis through a blog gives them a reason not only to continue to come back to your site, but also to share your information with their circle of influence. Make sure your blog is relevant, current, and informative.

If your business is such that it necessitates more immediate interaction with clients’ and prospects’ questions, you might want to consider adding live chat. Several platform options exist, and this could give your company an edge over your competition. If live chat isn’t really an option for your business, be sure to give excellent customer service. There is no substitute for great customer service.

And what about video? This means of communication is becoming more and more popular as it engages visitors on a more personal level. Even if you, like most of us, are a bit camera shy and uncomfortable in front of a webcam, consider doing a number of short videos to promote your business and let people get to know you and your team a bit better. And, trust me. I speak from personal experience – it does get easier the more you do it!

Surveys are also a good tool to use for visitor engagement. People love to be asked their opinion, especially if they can respond in a non-threatening environment.  When creating your survey, be sure to include some open-ended questions that will obtain more information than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Consider offering an incentive to your visitors for completing the survey to attain more participants.

Another technique that is gaining popularity is the exit poll. Similar to a survey, they typically ask only one question when a visitor is leaving a website. The most effective exit polls focus on objections that a visitor may have, such as ‘What prevented you from purchasing from us today?’

So what’s the bottom line?

By now you are starting to understand just why visitor engagement is so critical to growing your business online. A boring site that does little or nothing to engage visitors and encourage them to interact is actually detrimental to your bottom line. And, as you have read, it doesn’t really take too much effort to implement techniques and strategies that will improve your visitor engagement. Using the tools described in this article – and there are many others out there as well – will enrich your visitors’ experience, converting more browsers into clients.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

How To Use Your Website To Improve Your Business

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , , , , , , , , , , ,
website design to improve your business

Yes, your website can improve your business.

Most business people understand that having a website is an essential part of their business. The internet has become the “go-to” place for prospects to search for information to help them decide who they will do business with and you should be using your website to improve your business.

In the earlier days of the internet, a website was seen as a digital brochure, providing certain facts and information about products and services of a company. While a website still should contain these vital elements, visitors expect much more than the basics.

In order to turn your website from a static, non-engaging site to an important and dependable driver for your business, let’s look at how to improve your website and other online communications by making it effortless for your clients to introduce your business to their friends, family and business associates.

Make the Rule of 52 work for you:

Most likely, you have heard of the Rule of 52, which suggests that every person has an inner circle of 52 friends and family members, give or take. To use this to your advantage, create an effective online strategy that provides an effective conduit between your business and those connections of your clients. The resulting lead generation can be substantial. For example, if you have 50 clients, using the rule of 52, you have the opportunity to touch 2600 people.

So how do you reach out to these prospects? Well, a good website can provide the foundation for a relationship through developing a virtual connection with these people on their own terms. The key is to develop this relationship by making your website a vital resource.

How do you do that? Read on…

How to sell by teaching:

How is your website viewed by your clients? Is it merely an online brochure with limited opportunities for engagement, or is it seen as an enlightening source of quality information?
Your website will trigger an emotional response from your visitors, and you will quickly be dismissed if the emotion that is triggered is a “so what’. Additionally, if all your prospects and clients are getting from your site is ‘sell-sell-sell’, they are likely to leave and not return.

On the other hand, providing information and education on your site will heighten engagement as you quickly become a trusted resource, immediately improving your referability.

Assimilation is your friend:

Make sure that you are positioning your website as an information hub. By opting to inform people rather than trying to sell them, you will be providing your clients a ‘safe’ way to refer your business.
Be sure that you develop a habitual approach to providing this information. Consider things such as industry commentary, insights, and updates, newsletters, etc., and feed this information into your site on a regular and consistent basis to develop a following. Integrate these efforts with your social media channels to increase awareness and readership. It might seem like a lot of work but the payoff can be huge – and there are templates and automated processes to make it easier to integrate into your business.

Content is still king:

There is no substitute for content. The businesses that are benefitting the most from their online efforts are those who provide content on a consistent and frequent basis. Adding content sporadically simply doesn’t provide compounding results. By providing regular updates that are predictable, concise, and actionable come to be expected by your clients and prospects. Be sure to ask your readers to share your content to continue to build your following.

Remember that this strategy is one of building, not of selling. By differentiating your business from those who are looking for the ‘one-off’, you will build a solid foundation that will ease the transition from prospect to client.

The art of subliminal marketing:

One of the most powerful tools you can use to build interest in your business is an on-going newsletter. Use this tool judiciously; sending information too often can alienate your prospects and clients, and communicating too seldom can make you fade into the distance.

In some cases, a ‘tip of the week’ has proven effective. Weekly or twice weekly blog posting has proven to be an effective way of maintaining regular communication with your clients and prospects, and can also provide opportunities for dripping.

To be effective be sure to follow the following 3 important components:

1. Be sure to provide content on a consistent basis, and archive all posts on your website
2. Ask your clients and prospects to forward your posts and newsletters to their inner circle
3. Be sure to have an opt-in feature that allows visitors to your site to subscribe

Social media:

Social media can be a double edged sword. Remember that what you post on your social media sites reflects on you and your business. Avoid personal discourse to avoid judgement by potential clients. Don’t risk damaging your brand by posting something that you might regret later.
Use social media to drive traffic back to your website. Announce blog updates, new tips, etc., always pointing them back to your site.

All this will take time, but your efforts will compound. By creating a familiarity, you will gain trust, and your investment into your online presence is an investment in how you are perceived. By employing an integrated and consistent approach, you can ensure that clients and prospects place more trust you more than others who are vying for their business.

Until next time…

Are you ready to grow your business now? If you’re ready to take the next step and make your business more profitable, contact us today.

If you like the information you are receiving, please consider forwarding this post.

Who Is Designing Your Website?

Nancy Boisvert Newsletter , , ,
designing websites

I’m going to share a little secret with you about designing your website.

Those expensive, flashy, eye catching websites really don’t help you when it comes to your ROI.

As a matter of fact, there are tons of examples of companies that have poured many thousands of dollars into beautifully designed websites that have generated them no leads, no conversions, and therefore, no dollars!

When creating your website, start by determining it’s purpose.

Is your purpose to create or increase revenue or produce any sort of client or customer activity? If so, you want a marketing expert to work with you to develop your site, or to correct the issues on your current website that you bought from a webmaster or graphic arts company. Or, an even worse option that some companies have opted for are those online phone directory companies who purport to be able to build you a great website. A quick view of some of these sites will show you that they are ineffective, unattractive, and unlikely to bolster your business online. Read more

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