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What Does Your Business Website Need?

We’ve all seen ineffective and sometimes downright ugly business websites. From garage-run e-businesses to corporate websites that merely play a supporting presence to offline advertising, the internet is littered with pathetic examples of online understanding and misguided attempts at online commerce.

You’d think it’d be easy to send a hint to businesses that one-page WordPress websites (running Kubrick, of course) aren’t enough to highlight their qualities, but it’s often a losing cause. Many online businesses are run on assumptions – what could work rather than what does work – and are generally immune to suggestions built on metrics and data. Rather than investing in the data, thousands of online businesses put all their effort into an online presence that simply doesn’t have any measurable effects.

If you run an online business and want to improve your metrics and margins, read on to see how you can make your business website more effective. Remember, these tips, tactics and strategies aren’t limited to online businesses; offline businesses that are experimenting with online advertising and establishing a web presence will be able to put them to use in their planning and execution too.

What End Result Do You Want?

Designing a website purely for the sake of having one is a failed strategy. Unless you’re aiming to create real, measurable results, there’s no real point in having a website. If you move into the design and development process without a clear goal in mind you’ll likely end up with a website that both fails to convert and costs you valuable funding. So, whenever you aim to create a website (or make a change to an existing one) ensure that it’s a change that helps you move towards your goal.

The most important part of any business website is the end result. The nature of business is always the bottom line, unless you’re focused on social causes or non-financial goals. For the purpose of this study, the goal of any website is to convert readers into customers, clients or leads. Of course, this doesn’t mean that your entire web presence should be structured to create immediate profit, just that your website should have a long-term goal of turning prospects into customers.

Here’s an example. If you run a business that’s particularly apt at turning prospective clients into paying clients over the phone, is it most effective to share a great deal of information on your website? The most common assumption is to err on the side of too much when you’re designing a website, but it’s often not the most profitable strategy.

If your phone sales team is better at direct sales than your website, the focus of your website should be to drive prospective clients towards them. As such, focus on creating a website that guides the reader through your business, and eventually drives them to call you by phone. The best way to do this is to include phone contact information at the end of any sales text.

“Call us now for a free quote: 123 456 7890.”

That’s all it takes. All of your website’s content should be built around that one desired action. From there, your website has done its job. The rest of the task rests with your phone sales team.

In contrast, if your business doesn’t have a call center, you’d want to focus the entirety of your online efforts into generating direct quotes and inquiries. So, instead of structuring your sales/marketing materials to convert into phone conversations, you’d want to have them convert into online enquiries. Instead of “call for a free quote”, you would want something like:

“Contact us for a free quote via email or our online enquiry form.”

How It Works: The Call To Action

The easiest way to structure your website towards direct, measurable sales is to incorporate an element known as a “call to action”. The call to action is simply an element of your website that pushes visitors to take a specific action. For direct sales websites, the call to action is almost always geared towards entering a credit card or signing up for a service. For service businesses, the call to action begins a client contact process.

Your call to action can be anything; a text link, an image, or a contact form. Use anything you want, just be sure to gear it towards your target audience. If your website collects email information and communicates with customers via email, use an email capture box instead of a direct contact form. If you sell online, use a button that links visitors to your online shop. No matter what type of business you run, your call to action should be geared towards converting readers into customers.

Check out Posterous’s website. Their service isn’t geared towards selling a product, but encouraging people to blog using their website. There’s no email capture, no sales buttons, just a clear call to action encouraging people to submit content to their Posterous blog using an email provider. As your eyes move down the page, you’re first provided with information, then with reasons to join, and finally, with how to join.

Conflicting Calls To Action

What if your website has more than one intended outcome? This is a major problem for some online businesses, especially those that offer more than one product or service. There are several situations that seem to pop up more often than others:

1. Your website offers more than one service, all of which are in the same field.
2. Your website offers several services, each of which is unrelated to the other.
3. Your website offers one primary service, and has a backup service (or product) for anyone that isn’t interested in the first.

If you offer multiple products or services in the same category, it’s best to use the same call to action for all of them. For example, a web design business would may focus on page design, flash programming, and custom scripting. All of these services fall into the same category, so it’s smart to use a single call of action for all of them.

If you offer several different services, each of which are relatively unrelated, the best way to maximize conversions is to use the same form of call to action with separate interfaces for each service. For example, a SEO company could offer search engine services, page usability services, and also design and development services. While all three are related to web development and marketing in some form, they’re typically services that will appeal to different types of clients. As such, add the same order form to each service’s page, but separate the services themselves on your website to ensure the sales process is guided and tailored for each one.

Finally, for websites that have primary and secondary goals, the best way to approach the situation is to drive all traffic through the primary goal first. For example, a website designed to sell a product should focus on selling the product before all other situations. Your backup goal could be email submission, in which case you’d guide traffic towards buying first, then collect email information alone in the event that the sale doesn’t go through. Always guide your viewer’s attention towards the primary goal, and introduce the secondary goal after the first has been declined.

Now that you’ve taken care of your website’s goal, you need to add supporting features and functions.

What Supporting Presences Does My Website Need?

Creating a website that converts is just a fraction of the process. Truly effective online presences are designed to achieve two things: draw attention, and then sell. While I specialize in web design and development, I know that basic promotion is an absolutely essential part of effective design. If people don’t understand your website or don’t know where to find you, what use is a pretty website?

Dirt Cheap SEO: Incorporating a Blog Into Your Business Website

Blogs are an incredibly valuable promotional tool, not just for direct advertising but for the indirect SEO benefits that they can bring your website. If you want to increase your search engine traffic, add a reason for customers, clients and prospects to keep visiting, and make your website vastly more dynamic for visitors, incorporating a blog can be a great idea.

Adding a blog to your website is as simple as installing WordPress. If you’ve designed your business website from the ground up using a content management system, adding in a blog can become even more simple; just push a button and go. However, keeping your design consistent can take a bit of work, so consult your designer before going ahead with a business blog.

What value can a blog add to your website? There are two answers to that question, each covering a different aspect of a blog’s value. Firstly, there’s the organic promotional value that a blog offers. If your clients are interested in your business, they’ll have a reason to return to your website. Return business is good business, and passionate customers are one of the most important promotional resources out there. In addition to this, if a post on your blog happens to gain exposure in the blogosphere, there’s a huge chance that it will bring in additional business.

Secondly, there’s the SEO aspect of an internal blog. One half of the SEO equation is external links; the other is internal links and content. If your website is basic and spartan, a blog can create additional search engine value by offering service-specific content and internal links. Just by writing about your business, you can create additional search engine value for your business.

The Meatball Sundae: Is Social Media Worth It?

As tempting as it can be to add a “Tweet This!” button to every post, sometimes it just isn’t worth it. Famous marketing author Seth Godin went into detail on conflicting marketing in Meatball Sundae, offering a message that thousands of online businesses need to hear.

Sometimes, social media isn’t going to care about your business. If you’re a hubcap dealer, is a Twitter profile going to generate new leads and keep your audience interested in your business? Chances are high the answer is going to be “no”. The focus of your website, as discussed earlier, is on the direct effects that it can bring, and social media can often be more of a distraction than a sales tool.

However, if you think your business can benefit from social media, by all means add features into your website. Got a Twitter account? Incorporate it into your company blog using a WordPress plugin. Want to keep your readers up to date on what’s happening at your company? Use a Flickr account to keep up-to-date photo records of your office and surroundings. Just make sure you’re not investing in social media when it isn’t going help your business.

Simple Analytics: Measuring Effect and Actions

The purpose of any business website is to convert, right? Sadly, some businesses invest everything in a pretty website and leave no time to monitor whether or not it actually has the intended effects. Market research is the key to building a successful business, and the online world is no different to the offline world in this respect.

If you’re operating an online business that has a clear call to action and desired effect, you need to incorporate analytics and measurement software into your online marketing plan. Don’t worry, this isn’t something that’s going to cost you a lot. There’s some great free analytics software out there that can help you grow your online business and optimize your website for maximum conversions.

Google Analytics is a 100% free online analytics package that can save you hundreds of hours of guesswork when it comes to your business website. Add some simple javascript to your website (WordPress users can download a plugin here) and you’re ready to track visitors, monitor the effects of your business website and optimize towards better conversion rates.

Couple Google Analytics with Google Website Optimizer and you’ve got an optimization setup that’s hard to beat. While Analytics is great for identifying the problems, Website Optimizer is perfect for reversing them. Want to test a new version of your business website? Using Google Website Optimizer, you can run it alongside the old version, keeping track of which is the most effective.

Some good paid software to look at includes Crazy Egg, a heat mapping software package that helps you monitor which parts of your website are most effective. While Google Analytics gives you access to statistics about your online effectiveness, Crazy Egg incorporates visitor movement into a simple and direct heat map. Highly recommended for optimizing home pages and naviational systems.

For more advanced users, ClickTale offers the most comprehensive analysis tool around. Instead of just measuring the path that your visitors take, ClickTale will help you track form data, monitor the amount of time users spent on specific pages, and follow cursor movement as people move through your website. If you really need to maximize online conversions, this is the tool to use.

Adapting: How Often Do You Need To Update?

One question that always seems to be on the minds of businesses is their business website’s lifespan. Online business is changing at a rate much faster than its offline counterparts, and an outdated website can sometimes be as ineffective as none at all. Thankfully, content management systems make it easy to update your website and stay current with design trends and online developments.

The most important principle to keep in mind when playing for the long-term is simplicity. Simple websites scale effectively. Simple websites age more gracefully than their complex counterparts. Simple websites are much more effective at achieving a direct goal than complex, multi-page websites. A focus on simple will give your business website long-term potential, while a focus on needless features will often put you behind the pack quickly.

In 2002, there was nothing cooler than a Flash intro. Now, there’s nothing more despised. If you create your business website with a direct goal in mind, incorporate a clear and direct call to action, and use non-complicated marketing methods to get your goal out there, you’ll create something that scales for both time and size. An investment in direct, simple online promotion works much more effectively than an elaborate online presence, and customers will always side with the easiest option.

Hopefully these tips, tactics and strategies will help you build a business website that achieves its goals. There are thousands of examples out there of what not to do, and a simple Google search will provide you with a multitude of business websites to pick apart. If you guide yourself by identifying where your competitors have failed to incorporate key page elements, it makes it much more simple to add them to your own.

Do you run a business website? If you’ve got any suggestions for creating a profitable, measurable and effective online business presence, feel free to fire away in the comments with any tips or tricks that have helped you.

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