Is your homepage badly in need of an update? Fire up your browser and head on over to your website. Here's five crucial questions to ask yourself (and friends) about your homepage to see if it's really working for you as hard as it could be.

1. Does it grab visitors' attention in 8 seconds or less? Bored visitors probably won't stick around, and your competitors are just a Google search away!
2. Does it stimulate interest and reinforce reader's confidence that they're in the right place? What's worse than a boring website? An irrelevant one! If you sell widgets, make sure your homepage not only states clearly that you make widgets but why your widgets are better that your competitors. (Or why your services are better than your competitors')
3. Does it inspire the desire to take the action or clicking deeper towards a purchase? If you were your potential customer, would you be persuaded to do business with you based on your homepage content?
4. Is how they take action easy and obvious? Step 6 feet away from your monitor and look at the screen. Is it obvious where you want your visitors to click next? If not, you need a more obvious "call to action".
5. After they've clicked, does the next page give them satisfaction by providing exactly what they wanted how they wanted? Did you hammer home why your services or products are better than your competitors? Did you provide testimonials, assurances or guarantees to make doing business with you as risk free and comfortable as possible?

And there you have it! Critical website analysis in 30 seconds or less! I'd encourage you though to spend at least a few minutes on this task. Most of your website visitors probably enter your website through your homepage. Spending a little extra time to make sure it's doing its job of impressing your visitors can go a long way to getting more business from your website.

Is Your Website Content Up to Date?

Why wait till Spring before cleaning up your website? With a new year upon us, now is the perfect time to review your website and make sure all the information is up to date and that your content reflects any changes you may have made to your business in 2011.

Also, for Website On-Denand Clients, what better way to use up your 30 to 60 minutes of free website updating time for January that your Website On-Demand plan now comes with!

Tags: Untagged

Many Clients have expressed interest in improving their rankings in the local results listing that often appears at the top of search results. An earlier post I wrote covered adding your website to the local results listing, and so this post will hopefully shed some light on improving your rankings. The things you can do break down into a couple different categories:

• Completing your Google Local Business Centre profile
• Getting your website listed and mentioned on other websites and directories

 

Completing Your Google Local Business Centre Profile

If you haven't already done so, the first step is to claim your website in Google's local business centre and complete the verification process. You'll then want to fill in as much of your profile as possible including adding photos/videos, selecting the appropriate categories, using keyword-rich description text and more. Be sure to ask your Clients to review your business under your local business centre listing too!

1-800 numbers are great, but your local business centre listing is not the place for them. It's important to use a phone number with a local area code in your local business centre listing as this is one of the factors Google checks. Also, ensure that your phone number on your profile matches your phone number on your website. If you have a Yellowpages listing, it should match there too!

To summarize the steps to completing your profile:

• Claim, verify and update your profile
• Upload photos and videos to your profile
• Request that your Clients complete reviews of your business under your listing

 

Getting Your Website Listed and Mentioned on Other Websites and Directories

Google will also comb through the web and keep track of mentions of your business on other websites and directories. These mentions will be listed under your local business listing. The more mentions in respectable places (spam sites won't count for much!) your business receives, the better your ranking will likely be.

Where are these places you might ask? Carrie Hill at SearchEngineLand.com has a great article on them and so I direct you to her article at http://searchengineland.com/secret-sauce-leverage-outside-listings-to-help-local-rankings-41905 for more detail. A few of the places she mentioned include:

• Flickr Galleries
• Youtube Channel
• BOTW.org
• Review Sites
• Craigs List
• User Content

 

I hope this is helpful in your ascent up the rankings. If you have any questions about improving your website's ranking in search engines, please feel free to contact me at cnorton@alcaris.com.

Tags: Untagged

True, this article isn’t about websites. But I’ve read a few books on email campaigns recently, and I know that more than a few of you have ongoing email campaigns, so hopefully you’ll find the tips useful.

Let’s assume you have an email list of old prospects sitting around. Or perhaps you have a list of previous customers that haven’t done business with you in a while. Why not begin converting those prospects and inactive customers into new and active customers? A targeted email campaign is a great way to create business seemingly out of thin air (although really what you’re doing is monetizing your past efforts in marketing and sales.)

Below are the top tips from my research that you can use to make your next email campaign more effective. While mostly targeting towards service-based businesses, many of the tips below apply to product-based businesses as well.

1. Don’t overuse the words free, bonus, amazing, etc. These commonly appear in spam emails and may cause your email to wind up in your recipients spam folder.
2. In your email, get to the benefits part quickly.
3. Timing is everything with email campaign. Don’t send your email campaign on weekends, Mondays and Fridays. Also, try to avoid sending your emails first thing in the morning. People are in a rush first thing in the morning, and emails not immediately relevant to their work are likely to be deleted. Tuesdays through Thursdays in the late morning and early afternoon are better times to send your email campaigns. Most email campaign software allows you to schedule specific times for sending out your email campaign.
4. Write your emails to target your customers’ “hot buttons”. These are challenges that are of the utmost importance to your customers. Your email should make your customers aware of things that are preventing them from getting the results they’re looking for, and, of course, should pose your products and services as part of that solution.
5. Keep your paragraphs short (2 to 3 sentences) and include as few as possible.
6. Personalize the subject line – the more specific, personal and relevant, the better.
7. Ensure that the email appears to be sent from you rather than some generic address like sales@yourcompany.com. Nobody really wants to read an email from sales@yourcompany.com, particularly if they may not remember the name of your company.
8. Use font styling like bold and italics often to keep the text visually interesting. Do not mix font faces and font sizes.
9. Be clear about next steps. There should be no confusion (it should be blatantly obvious) what you want the prospect to do next.
10. Include a supplementary offer in your email in case your main “next step” is considered too daunting. Examples of a supplementary next step include signing up for email updates on your blog, downloading a report, visiting your Facebook group, etc.

Tags: Untagged

If you're like 99% of business owners out there, your Google Analytics traffic reports may be a little hard to understand. Fortunately, there's 4 simple questions you can use to begin understanding your Google Analytics website traffic reports and gathering insights from them.

Here are the questions to ask after you receive your traffic report:

 

1. How many visitors are coming to your website?

a. Do you have a problem attracting traffic to your website? (feel free to ask us for help!)

b. Also, look for long term trends (is traffic going up?) and seasonality (is there a time of year when traffic is highest? lowest? Why?)

 

 

2. Where are your visitors are coming from?

a. What referring websites are sending you traffic? (e.g., is all the time you're investing in Facebook paying off with traffic to your website?)

b. What keywords are (and are not) sending you traffic from search engines? (getting traffic to your website from industry-related keywords is ideal - not just your business name)

 

 

3. What do you want your visitors to do on your website?

a. What is the goal of your website? It's raison-de-existent. Do you want people to fill out your contact form, sign-up for your newsletter, make a purchase, etc? Deciding your website's goal is critical as you can't "improve" your website until you know what exactly it should be doing for you.

 

 

4. What are your visitors actually doing on your website?

a. Look at your top content and entry pages. If you want people to complete your contact form, are visitors even getting to your contact form page? If not, what can you do to change that? If they get to the contact form page, are they staying on the page or are they "bouncing"? Are they being encouraged enough to complete the contact form?

 

Have questions? Need some help looking at your analytics report or need more detailed information from your analytics report? Feel free to email me at cnorton@alcaris.com.

Tags: Untagged

A new (and free!) online tool is available that invites visitors to complete a quick, post-visit survey on their experience with your website and whether they found what they were looking for.

If you haven't considered adding a survey to your website in the past, I would recommend considering it now.

You should be receiving monthly analytics reports about your website which is a great starting point. However, your analytics reports can only tell you that someone came to your website. Adding in a post-visit survey is a great way to find out "why" someone came to your website. (And importantly, whether your site provided them with what they were looking for.)

To Get Started

The tool is called 4Q, and you can sign-up for it at http ://www.4qsurvey.com/ On the registration page, be sure to select 4Q Free under the product type!

Once you've signed-up and gone through all the steps of creating your survey, it will provide you with code to add to your website. Simply email that code to us and we'll help you add it to your website. (This is a free service for all Website On-Demand monthly plan clients. If you're not currently a monthly plan client, we're happy to help you with this as well, however there's a $40 installation charge.)

In Other News

We're hard at work working on the new Website On-Demand website. I haven't written much recently, but once the new website and blog are up you can count on a steady stream of news on the latest and greatest tools and strategies you can use to get the most from your Website On-Demand website!

Tags: Untagged