Happy New Year! All of us at Blue Zenith Web Design would like to take this opportunity to wish our clients, partners, friends and family a wonderful and prosperous New Year!
If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’re likely starting the new year with a renewed dedication to take your business to the next level. However, it’s also likely that you don’t have a revolutionary new product idea or a significant amount of new capital that could immediately elevate your business.
Boost Your Bottom Line
It does not mean that there aren’t opportunities available to you to boost your sales and revenue, even if you’re lacking a new product or access to capital. Making changes to your website, even small changes in some instances, can improve the findability of your site and boost the customer experience. Surprisingly even small changes can provide an immediate boost to sales. How is this possible? The unfortunate fact is that if your website is outdated or designed improperly, you could be losing a significant number of potential customers and corresponding sales. Applying fixes to correct these flaws can result in an immediate and sometimes significant boost to your bottom line.
Bots Are The New Website Visitors
When many of us think of websites and visitors to websites, we usually think of people utilizing a personal computer or mobile device to manually visit and interact with a site. However, there is another group of website visitors that are silent, invisible and equally important to ensuring that your website is successful. Web crawlers are automated “bots” that continuously scan the public internet for new and existing websites. They crawl about recording and transferring information about those sites back to search engines such as Google and Bing.
If your website is outdated or poorly designed, you may be hindering the ability of search engines to properly index your site. The result of this can be your website falling behind in search rankings and making it considerably more difficult for prospective customers to find your site. Even an oversight such as not providing a dedicated mobile version of your site or utilizing a responsive site theme can hurt your ranking, as Google and other search engines now test the mobile “friendliness” of their indexed sites.
The Importance of a User Friendly Experience
In addition to ensuring your website is accommodating web crawlers, it’s just as important to ensure that your human visitors, which include existing and prospective customers, have an equally easy and successful experience navigating your website. It’s important to easily locate information or a product listing, view associated information and fluidly complete the checkout process.
Both of these types of website visitors are equally important: if your website and its components are not easily findable to web crawlers, search engines will not direct existing and prospective customers to your site. Conversely, these existing and prospective customers will quickly abandon your site if it is difficult or impossible for them to find the product or information they need to easily complete the checkout process. Successful websites have perfected the findability of information and website components for both their human and “bot” visitors. This, being whether those visitors are utilizing a desktop or mobile device to access the site, or testing for desktop and mobile findability.
Update or Redesign Your Website To Improve Findability
Determining whether or not your website needs to boost its Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which improves findability for web crawlers, and can improve the customer experience and findability for your human visitors doesn’t require professional assistance, at least at first. Any entrepreneur can conduct their own tests to determine if their site is prominently ranked in search results. It’s also possible to conduct your own usability and findability tests to determine if you can easily find information, locate products and services quickly and complete the checkout process in an easy manner.
Conducting website tests at home can identify obvious or significant problems with your website’s findability and customer experience. But it still pays to consult web design and SEO professionals to do a more refined testing. The testing can involve studying analytical data, conducting SEO analysis and updating or even redesigning your website to improve its SEO, in-site search, mobile friendliness and ecommerce functionality. Depending on how significant these issues may be, even a modest investment in updating, redesigning and improving its findability and the overall customer experience can make a real difference in generating sales and boosting your bottom line!
Your Competitors Are Making It Easy to Find Their Websites
When considering the impact of your website’s SEO, findability and the customer experience, it’s important not to think of your website as existing in a vacuum, even if you’re doing so inadvertently. When considering whether or not to invest in site updates or upgrades that will improve these elements, you must also consider the fact that if existing and prospective customers are not able to find your website or have difficulty finding information, products or services or completing the checkout process, they will immediately begin seeking out one of your competitors. Understanding how well your competitors have mastered SEO, findability and the customer experience can help you improve your own site, bolster what makes your business unique in the marketplace and give you a head start on attracting and retaining new customers!