Not a website redesign, just a strategy change.

Websites are loose change

The term websites should ultimately phase out.  It has become a term pollutant in the air that whenever it is uttered there is a real stereotypical response customer generally auto-format a response to, “We already have one”, “No thank you”, “We don’t need it”…  The real issue is the word, not the tool.  A website is great to have if you understand its genuine marketability.  Too often people check the box without realizing it’s not just a symbol of one’s conquering of the digital space.  Without a strategy, it’s just a book you never read.   The strategy lies within the content, imagery, and solutions it offers.

Why a re-design

Many business owners pour their life force into a business, then take the proceeds to pour into a website, but how do you judge if your site is performing.  A couple of tools can really help.  Google Analytics is one, it offers simple to complex information regarding the usage of your site, sub-pages, clicks, and more.

You can see how users judge your site simply if they leave quickly or stay for the information.  You can also learn about pages that are used more often than others and how quickly users navigate away.  If you see a poor performance from all your pages, you could be looking at a rebuild of your strategy.  There are many other solutions you can use to determine how well your site is performing but Google Analytics is a free solution and you should add it to your site if it is not already.

Not a Website redesign, its a strategy change

Strategy-based websites are full of solutions that build a business from the ground up.  You wouldn’t hire an artist without seeing the art they can create.  So you wouldn’t buy a service or a product from a company without being able to see and understand either one.  We already gave you a tool to use to determine if you are in need of a change in your online strategy, but let’s go through and talk about some visual cues you can use as well.

1. Does your site contain keywords that tell Google search engine what you do?  These are called Meta Tags, and if they are improperly compiled you could be looking at a loss in how easy it is to find you in the Google search engine.  During the original development of your site, each page should have sufficient content that supports your Meta Tags, if this was never defined or skipped by your developer you may have a lot of work you will need to do.  Header tags (h1 – h6) generally influence how well your site scores within Google as well as how much content that supports your Meta Tags keywords.
2. Your design isn’t mobile-friendly, this has a considerable impact on your scoring within GSE.  If your site doesn’t scale properly then likely you are being downranked for failing this measurement.  Your developer should start with either a Mobile-first strategy or a strategy that contains a mobile responsive scaling.  Without this, you bought a website that Google will immediately reduce in rank.
3. Your Home page has no call to action or has no direction within the first few moments of landing on the page.  All my projects start with a simple call to action.  Go here, Learn More, contact us. You should drive your viewers to the information you want them to see within the first few moments of coming to your site.  Notice in our video below how we engage users with content that follows you to the real driver of our information.  The sales Force Recruiter.com uses a real solid approach to a strategy-focused tool.  The primary focus delivers you to the water we want users to drink from.

What to do now

Your first step is to develop your strategy; which should include following some simple goals you want to achieve before ever consulting with a Digital Agency.  Easy simple solutions allow us a base to start from.  They could be as simple as :

• I want more website views
• I want more likes on my social media
• I want more traffic to my store
• I want more orders

Once you identify those issues you want a solution for it’s now our process to create those solutions for you.

• Your website isn’t user-friendly, here are some changes we recommend.
• You need to add more content to your social media and ask people to share
• You are missing information that makes it easy to find you such as Yelp / Google My Business / Facebook / Instagram
• You need an eCommerce solution

Clearly, these are really simple strategies but they are the foundations that more prominent strategies can be built on.  If you are unsure of what you want your site to do, let the agency give you industry standards to help guide you.  The biggest takeaway from this is not to buy into a website redesign without some awareness of a strategy as we had talked about previously.   If you need to talk to an expert for a coaching session we offer them $50 a session.  We will review your site, look at your SEO, social and help you create a strategy.  Thank you for reading we look forward to helping you!