Your new web site isn’t achieving its goals? You do not have objectives for your web site? It’s a shame, your site and its ecosystem could be generating new customers for your company. At Exo, we developed a tool for diagnosis, allowing us to determine what needs improving on our clients’ web sites and allows us to optimize the online presence of their company. Here are some points which are currently being used. Do you pass the test? Take part in the experiment.
1. Is it easy to navigate in your web site?
The principal navigation tool should be no more than 6 or 7 visible tabs at the top of your website. Any secondary navigation must also be accessible by the menu and should not exceed 3 levels. When the cursor hovers over a user tab, show the 3 levels available. Customers appreciate a clear navigation, which is right on target.
Your footer must be complete. This simplifies navigation for the user, but can also contribute to improving ranking of your web site.
The graphics of your site must communicate, in an effective way, what you do. The communication comes before the beauty. The graphic designer who designed your site may have put together a true work of art, but if your site does not quite communicate what your company offers as a service, it’s unfortunately, useless.
2. Your site must be optimized for a mobile device
It’s a fact, more and more internet users are mobile (thanks to smart phones and tablets):
In the short term, the majority of visitors will spend more time on a tablet or smart phone than on a traditional computer. (E Source: ComScore February 2013)
Is it important that your site is adapted for these platforms? Yes! Absolutely! According to Google (September 2012), 61% of visitors who do not almost instantaneously find what they look for on a mobile device will change sites very quickly.
3. Do you have a blog?
“There is nothing to say about my industry; 2-3 articles and we’ve said it all … “. “Exo, good luck finding us subjects on our industry”.
Actually, there is always content, information and innovation to share! Such is the industry of one of our customers: labels. We have accompanied them for more than 3 years. The result? 2 blog articles per week … and we never fell short of ideas! Here is the proof.
According to Exact Target (SalesForce), companies that blog:
- Generate 67% more leads per month compared to those that do not blog (source: Social Media B2B).
- The blogs give the web sites 97% more indexed links (source: Content+).
- Leads from organic sources have a success rate of 14,6%, while outbound have a success rate of 1,7% (Source: Hubspot).
- 60% of the consumers are more confident after having read content on a web site (Source: Content+).
4. You must be on social networks
In B2B, you must particularly be active on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. You must share content on a regular basis (e.g. : 1-2 news updates per week for LinkedIn). One could write an entire book on statistics that flourish from social media and its importance, but I chose these:
- According to Exact Target (SalesForce), LinkedIn generates more sales for B2B companies than Facebook, Twitter or blogs. (source: Inside View)
- According to MediaBistro, 82% of leads on social media come from Twitter
Usually, social networks must be highlighted on top on the banner page of your web site, and especially, be very visible.
Always try to create engaging content; for example, it is suggested on LinkedIn, to share news on your industry; tips and best practices. On Twitter, a tweet with an image is more engaging and will be re-tweeted more often than the tweets without images.
5. Your site must have a Call-to-action
This 5th point is very important! The purpose of the call-to-action is to lead the internet user to engage by filling a form to have access to your last report for instance or to receive information or, by being contacted directly. Also, use verbs of action and position them well at the top of your site. For example:
- Download our latest e-book
- Plan a demonstration
- Subscribe to our newsletter
6. Analyse your traffic
Google Analytics is not only used to count the number of visits on your site. Although it can be rather pleasant to count thousands of visits on your site, one never summarizes the performance of a web site to the volume of the visits; it is necessary to consider the time spent on the pages, the rebound rate, the recurring visitors, the pages seen, and so on. And to monitor the performance of your website over time, creating a dashboard is required. We cannot control what we do not measure.
Of course, the complete analysis of a Web site does not stop at these 6 points. This is just a summary of the checklist that Exo carries out towards an increasingly powerful site to your target customers.
