Does Your Website Fit?

Business website planning when done well yields results. Have you spent time wisely?

At start-up, you allocate funds to equip your office, purchase computers and software to manage your business. However, did you allocate business website planning time and funds to get the website your business needs to attract the right customers and present your brand correctly?

One Size Does NOT Fit All

Websites are not “one-size fits all” solutions. To get one that is tailored precisely for your business needs, you must know:

Who your primary customers are
What they search for on the Internet
How your products and services fulfill their needs and wants
What is the primary purpose of your website
What is the primary action your site’s visitors should take
Who is going to manage your website and keep it updated
How will you track success or quantify conversions
How will you market your website

These insights help you develop buyer personas for each potential customer visiting your website—and they may be different than other buyer personas you’ve developed for face to face sales. Buyer personas in turn help your web design and development firm to create the site that will support your business goals.

Of course, you know your business goals are not the same as your competitors. And you know your brand must have a different selling proposition—one which positions your company distinctively when compared to your competition.

Tailored for Your Business

We often see people with great ideas and stellar business concepts essentially shutting the door to potential opportunity when they decide that their website can be created by their friend’s teenage son or by using cheap web site development templates or online site building tools.

They make the mistake of buying “off the rack” and getting a template or design that was made to fit just about anybody. What often happens after purchasing off the rack? They spend their precious dollars having a web developer reverse engineer the template to fit their business brand and goals.

Isn’t it much more efficient to build what is best going to suit your business? This is a no-waste strategy. Get exactly the right solution for exactly your goals.

Don’t expect that you can figure this out in an afternoon, or a day or even a week. You will need to do some homework. Know how your competitors’ sites function. You must look at lots of websites—within and without your industry. Evaluate what works as you use a site and what frustrates you. Try, if you can, to think like a customer, not as the business. Analyze what makes you leave a site or what makes you stay. And most importantly, what makes you take a particular action? All these insights will clarify for you and your web developer how to design and implement the site your firm needs which will fit the needs of your customers. Remember, the customer is the ultimate user, not you. It is her you must satisfy.

Your website is your twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five overview of your firm, lead generator and answer provider—and if you offer e-commerce, your always-open online store.

And if you already have a website for your business does it gain you leads? Does it offer all the right information to your customers? Have you ever asked your customers what they like best about your site or like least? Do you track how successful it is? If you cannot answer these questions definitively, then you may need to invest the time and take a fresh look at your site. And you may need to give it a boost or even a redesign so it works. After all, if your site doesn’t work for you what good is it?

Start With the End In Mind

How can you get started planning your website? We provide this planning questionnaire to our customers. Use it. Doing so will help you spend wisely, and will yield you a custom tailored website that fits your business, and which helps you get the right kind of leads to grow your business.

Photo by pina messina on Unsplash

Don’t Gamble Away Your Brand Name: Buy Domain Names and Hold ‘Em

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

How valuable is your brand name?

You may think you’re not a gambling person, but if you don’t own all your brand’s top level domain names, you’re sitting at the table, and throwing away all your aces. You could take a bit of advice from The Gambler

If you’re gonna play the game, boy
You gotta learn to play it right

Value can be fixed based on transactions, visits to your website and sales history. But a brand has value which extends beyond mere monetary transactions.

When you purchase your domain name for your brand, did you purchase every variable for it? If you only purchased one variant of it, you may be “out of aces” and leaving your business vulnerable to brand exploitation. As an example, no one would be better one than Ted Cruz*.

Don’t let your brand name be hijacked

Ted Cruz announced that he is running for President as a Republican candidate. His conservative stance upsets many on the left and in the middle. Opponents of his candidacy took advantage of available domain names related to the candidate’s brand/name. And It didn’t take them long to get busy with mischief. Because the Cruz campaign didn’t purchase these domains, there is now a bit of PR kerfuffle for the team to pay attention to when they probably would rather be working on other aspects of their candidate’s campaign.

The mischief makers redirected the domains they purchased (which should have been purchased by Cruz and his campaign long ago) to websites which are antithetical to Cruz’s platform and stated views.

readyforcruz.org is redirected to plannedparenthood.org
tedcruz.com has a message in support of President Obama
tedcruzforamerica.com is redirected to healthecare.gov

Anyone can purchase a domain name.

Back in the height of the housing bubble in 2006, homeowners who were disgusted with their homes constructed by a major national volume homebuilder, purchased a domain that was negative towards that homebuilder. They posted a website at that domain declaring for all the world how much they hated their homes and the builder. Even today,

www.kb-homesucks.com is still proclaiming for all to see how much these homeowners hate the builder.
www.kbhomesleak.com obviously states certain owner’s dissatisfaction.

Go beyond .com

When you purchase your brand’s domain name, purchase all available variants of it that you can afford. Include .com, .net, .org, .biz, .us and more. While you may never use these domain names to refer to a website, you don’t want to leave yourself vulnerable to pranksters or even competitors who decide to hijack your good brand and use it for their benefit.

As Kenny Rogers sang, “You gotta know when to hold ‘em.”

*We are not stating any partisanship nor support for any candidate by authoring this post. We are merely using this situation as a teachable moment for all business owners.

Go Mobile Now or Risk Google Search Rank

Posted by Cheryl Smithem

Go mobile now

According to MarketingCharts.com In the United States, “three of every four US mobile subscribers aged 13 and older owned a smartphone during the 3-month period ending in December 2014.” The data comes from a comScore study published February 9, 2015.

People are using mobile devices to search and interact with websites in increasing numbers. In 2014 Google announced that mobile friendly websites would be denoted in search results.

On February 26, 2015, Google announced that as of April 21, 2015 the search engine will be, “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal.” It won’t be long before Google begins demoting sites which aren’t mobile friendly in rankings in favor of those sites which are mobile friendly.

Google will do this because the search dominator wants to serve consumers useful, helpful information that works for them. That is Google’s first and highest priority. Everything they do regarding search ranking is based on websites’ meeting this criteria. In the past sites which contained malware, or poor content have been demoted. We have seen the same for sites which have backlinks to poor quality websites. Now we will begin to see the same loss of rank for sites which aren’t mobile compatible.

Google’s tools

Google provides tools to use to determine if your site is mobile friendly. If a site is mobile compatible, the tool displays an emulation of how the site appears and a message that the site is mobile friendly.

If the site is not mobile friendly, this is what you’ll see:

The results of sites which aren’t mobile friendly are detailed in the results.

If your site is not mobile friendly, what should you do?

In order that your firm’s site rank well in Google search results after April, you must upgrade your site to one which is mobile compatible. That means you can update the site with a new responsive theme, or add a separate mobile only site. Of these solutions, we favor a responsive site which conforms to devices.

You can make your site mobile compatible with software, which is acceptable, but is not quite as good a solution as a site which is natively responsive and conforms to the device.

Learn more by reading Google’s guide to creating mobile friendly websites.

Need help creating a mobile friendly site? Contact us.