Did I catch your attention? A comment that is incredibly offensive to hear, but yet still true at the end of the day whether you want to admit it or not. Your customers say this literally out loud as they are shopping, browsing, having a horrible user experience, or clicking things on your website that are simply not working. The scary thing is you do not get the opportunity to hear these things in real time. What is even worse is you have actually had employees tell you that you should redesign your website and your sales people are telling you that customers or prospects are saying negative things about your website.
I am talking to you Mr. or Mrs. CEO and executive leadership. This is a wake up call and a chance to start doing something today about it.
You should be redesigning your website every 2-3 years (or even more frequently depending on the industry). It had better be responsive for mobile devices and your photography needs to be engaging (no cheesy hand shakes, puzzle pieces, or light bulbs). It's an investment that you have to make time for and allocate a budget towards. Wait- stop there. It needs to be a realistic number and you should call around to get ranges (and the ranges will be all over the place, so brace yourself), but more importantly you need to find a partner, not a vendor (if you outsource the website or hire a company). The timeline needs to be realistic so you can make sure the quality is there. The return is exponential compared to the time, money, and energy you put in. I have often found out the more strategic and timely efforts are often the most rewarding ones.
User Experience is very important because it affects your bounce rate, CTR (cick-through rate), and ultimately conversions.
SEO is not a fast thing and guaranteed results are reasons to run from other companies. Do you go to the gym one time per month and expect to have fast results? SEO for your website is like going to the gym-you need to be doing strategic things constantly to get where you want to go ultimately. Don't pay for link building. If your only conversation with your SEO agency is around a monthly dashboard report, that's a problem. They should be your strategic partner. Content is still king and yes you need to have an updated blog-once per week and it needs to be quality content.
A/B testing should be required upon your new website launching to always be optimizing and ultimately leading to more conversions, which leads to more revenue.
Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed this blog post and are motivated to do the inevitable thing you "do not have time for." I would love to hear from you on whether you agree with this or have experienced something similar with the situations I have described above.
Don't Put off Until Tomorrow What You Can Do Today - Benjamin Franklin