So it’s time to update your business’s website and you, like most businesses, have a fairly tight budget. The big question is how do you allocate that budget?
Content is King, all hail the king
There is a lot that goes into building great websites, but one of the most important things is content. Great images help give people a visual of your company, and great text will provide your customers with the information they need and drive them towards your goal and help drive SEO. Content should always be your first priority. If you do nothing else but focus on your content, you’ll see results.
We recommend working with a professional copywriter to generate your text as they (should) know how to write for your target audience, and be able to write in a voice that your clientele can identify with, and will help sell your product or service. I’ve seen a few companies that where exceptionally good at writing their own content, but most of them ended up either too technical, and used too many industry specific terms, or were not detailed enough, assuming the target audience knew the details. In the end, investing in content is one of the best investments you can make.
Don’t waste money marketing a poor quality site
I’ve seen many companies spend a fortune marketing a site that doesn’t have a snowballs chance in pizza oven in getting a conversion, or is simply broken. Investing in SEO and PPC or any other form of marketing before making sure that your site is up to scratch is a complete waste of money, and any marketing company worth a grain of salt will tell you that.
This comes back to the content. If your content is really good, than that should help any SEO marketing efforts and help lower PPC costs. It’ll bring up your conversion rate, and in the long-term be better for your company. Once you have solid content, and the site performs, than you can start looking at PPC and other forms of marketing.
A nice package can help a sale, but it doesn’t make a sale.
We love to design websites, and nice, functional custom designed sites are definitely something we think is important, however as important as we think that is, and as much as it hurts to say it, a nice design won’t sell your product or services. We’ve done a large number of testing for a number of customers and one thing that we’ve seen time and time again is that increasing the quality of content has a higher impact on conversions than design changes with the sole exception where the design changes drastically improved usability.
Don’t get us wrong, great design has a huge part to play in your overall marketing plan. Having a clean, custom, well designed site that accurately reflects your brands image is very important, and should not be a neglected element, however if you have to make a choice between design and content, content will get you the higher ROI.
The Exception – Usability
We mentioned usability and this one is important, more so than content. Your site has to be usable and accessible. As an example – A bar, club or restaurant has a clientele that will mostly be using a mobile device (probably an iPhone) to access the website. If the website is not mobile friendly, or worse – Flash than a large number of visitors simply can’t access or use the website. In this instance usability should be the first priority.
In this situation? Need help figuring out where your site needs improvement?
Contact us today, and we’ll be happy to help you.