With Halloween just around the corner, creepy costumes and spooky decorations will temporarily be the norm. For business owners, however, the scariest part of the Halloween season will come when they review their website’s traffic data. If a company is drawing in fewer leads and converting fewer customers each month, then it’s probably time to make major changes to the website.
In fact, the potential ROI for a proper website transformation is so staggering that it’s a little scary. Consider that, on average, users typically engage with a website for 10 to 20 seconds before moving on to another site or back to their search engine. If your website design is not optimized to present a value proposition within that 10-to-20-second window, then chances are your company is missing out on a significant amount of potential traffic.
Improving design to account for user behaviors will considerably improve the value of a company’s website. Look to make changes sooner than later, lest your company’s current website become a terrifying example of poor investments.
1. Exorcise Ghosts of Marketing’s Past
Vengeful spirits are a common theme during the Halloween season. Typically, these pesky poltergeists target those who wronged them in life, hoping to find closure. Outdated marketing strategies pose a similar problem for business owners, especially when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO).
That’s because Google and other search engines have continuously updated and refreshed the algorithms they use to analyze websites and rank them for relevancy. Several SEO strategies, such as duplicating content or overstuffing keywords, will now actually hurt a website’s performance on Google.
Unless a company wants their website to be haunted by unethical marketing strategies, it may be time for the entire website to undergo a major overhaul.
Tips of Terror: A new website design means that your company will need to reconsider how the navigation of the website is organized. Take this opportunity to cut out extraneous pages and make your menu more navigable for the user.
2. Raise SEO from the Grave
Zombies, skeletons and other undead creatures often appear in spooky stories. While bringing back someone from the dead is impossible, fixing a company’s dying SEO performance is nearly as difficult.
Even worse, if your company has not developed a targeted content strategy, mastered the nuances of metadata and alt tags or earned links from established authorities in your industry, then you can mark your SEO strategy as dead on arrival.
A website redesign is a perfect opportunity to rethink not only what your website looks like, but also what it does to covert leads into customers and rank well in search engine results. That’s because the design of the website is directly related to SEO as well.
A well-designed website uses precise, organized copy and appealing graphic design to guide visitors further along the marketing funnel. Images should help keep a customer’s attention and prevent them from bouncing to a competitor’s website. By piquing a visitor’s interest, a newly designed website can play an important role in improving a company’s search engine results.
Tips of Terror: The rise of voice search technology will have a major impact on SEO in the near future. The ubiquity of mobile phones means that voice search-capable tech is getting into the hands of more consumers every day. Marketers must consider how to rank for phrases that are closer to conversational speech than traditional search engine inquiries.
3. Dispel Negative Feedback
If you plan on battling the forces of darkness, it helps to know how to dispel a curse. In the digital era, curses appear in the form of disgruntled or unsatisfied customers posting in very public forums. Whether that be in the comment section of a company’s blog or on a consumer review site like Yelp, these customer complaints are highly visible and can have a significantly negative impact on a company’s brand.
More often than not, it is impossible to make these negative reviews, ratings or comments disappear. Companies must instead earn an overwhelming volume of positive feedback to balance the scale. A flood of affirming comments pushes negative feedback into the background, painting these complaints as outliers.
What’s a highly effective way to make a great first impression on new potential customers? If you guessed “a website redesign,” then you guessed correctly!
In addition to making your website attractive to new visitors, a redesign also signals to previous visitors that a company has committed itself to improvement.
The launch of an updated website can also be leveraged as a marketing opportunity. Consider reaching out to customers or partners who have not touched base with you recently by announcing your revamped web presence. A successful website redesign can even spearhead an entire rebranding effort.
Tips of Terror: There are times when a string of negative customer interactions or public relations snafus make it impossible to revive a brand. In cases like these, it’s best to stop pushing the boulder up the hill and start working on a strategic rebranding effort. A fresh, optimized website will be a central part of this rebrand strategy. A new brand name may not hurt, either.
4. Carve Out Your Special Niche
Halloween isn’t all gloom and ghouls. Pumpkin carving is a great opportunity for kids and adults alike to show their originality. When competing in a congested market space, it can be difficult to appear original next to myriad rival companies that provide similar services.
Of course, providing top-notch work and a high level of service quality will encourage your customers to keep coming back. But it’s going to be a website’s visually appealing and user-friendly functionality that converts curious visitors into first-time customers.
If you need to stand out from the crowd, a memorable website that encourages visitors to make a purchase decision is your best bet for attracting new business.
More importantly, rebranding and marketing efforts help a company to establish itself as a uniquely talented player in the industry. Branding is successful when customers believe that a company has a one-of-a-kind service to provide. A newly updated website goes a long way toward convincing customers that this is the case.
Tips of Terror: Successfully developing a website that reflects a company’s unique mission and values is a challenge in of itself. This task is even more difficult when these goals and values are unclear. Take time to understand the company’s personality before starting a comprehensive website redesign.
Tips for Summoning Help to Your Side
If your company decides to deploy a new marketing strategy, major changes to the website are more than likely going to be a part of this refresh.
Your company will get its full ROI by identifying digital marketing best practices and developing solutions to incorporate these strategies into the site’s redesign. That process starts by reviewing helpful digital marketing resources like the ones found in our informative blog.
