You've been hearing a lot about online marketing from me in the past several columns -- making your Web site search engine-friendly through proper search engine optimization (SEO), building relationships with customers through e-mail marketing and the advantages of pay-per-click ads.
But before you invest in online marketing, or any other type of marketing, to bring targeted traffic to your Web site, make sure prospective customers know what to do when they arrive at your site and can easily do it.
You wouldn't invite guests into your home for a dinner party without first cleaning, and preparing food and drink for them. So don't invite prospective customers into your Web site without properly preparing. If it has confusing navigation, poor design, or if it takes forever to download, you'll be wasting their time. If you're not using any strategy or putting thought into your site, especially the homepage, you're throwing money away bringing in traffic. And you might be hurting your professional image because people judge your organization by the way your Web site looks and operates.
Review the two case studies below and if either sounds like what's happening with your Web site, fix things this week, if possible. If you delay, you'll continue to drive away potential customers.
« A new client came to me for consultation last year with an existing Web site another company had developed. The homepage was in need of several things to make it more effective but the biggest thing my new client had to fix was the download time of her homepage. She had spent thousands and thousands of dollars on e-mail blasts to bring a half million visitors to her site. Unfortunately, because the download time of her homepage was 25 seconds on a high-speed connection, 98 percent of that traffic (according to her Web site statistics), was bailing and not hanging around. I made recommendations which decreased the download time from 25 seconds to three seconds on a high-speed connection. The Web site owner increased sales by 75% over the previous year!
Your homepage should download in three seconds or less on a high-speed connection. Yes, I said three seconds. Don't forget that half the U.S. online population has a slower modem connection. Their download time should be around eight seconds or less. If it takes more than three seconds for your homepage to display (clear your cache before you time it -- you've been visiting your own site a lot, hopefully, and your computer has cached images and other files so it will display quickly), review how big the file size is for your images or if there's too many images/ graphics or if there's too much flash animation and nothing for people to read as it downloads.
« Another new client came to me earlier this year because he needed search engine optimization and pay-per-click ads created to increase leads to his Web site. The first thing I looked at was how effective the existing Web site was. If there are barriers to communication with the target audience, such as slow download time, poor design, no strategy, then, of course, we need to fix these things before you invest money in online marketing of the site. Sometimes the whole Web site needs to be demolished and a better, strategic one built. In this case, we didn't have to re-design his site -- we fine-tuned it. We rewrote the homepage text to be more persuasive and added calls-to-action; we re-designed the header area of the pages and added more effective stock photos to emotionally connect his audience. Then we applied proper search engine optimization and set up effectively written pay-per-click ads. Twelve weeks later, the client had increased his number of clients by 44% over the previous year because his new clients were finding him in the top three listings of Google.
As the end of the year approaches and you review what worked and what didn't work with your business, take a good look at your biggest marketing tool: your Web site. As Internet users grow more sophisticated, we are more critical and less patient with poorly developed Web sites. We'd rather do business with a company that knows what it's doing and we're figuring out if you know what you're doing by visiting your Web site.
Prepare your Web site before bringing in targeted traffic - To learn more about this author, visit Lori Gama's Website.
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