If your online presence isn’t as impressive as one of your customers walking into your business and interacting with your best employee, it’s costing you sales. Most transactions begin with online research. Even the highest converting lead, which is a customer referral, 9 out of 10 times researches the business before purchasing from them. The double edge sword of a business website is that you can be working out of your mom's basement and look like a Fortune 500 company, but on the flipside, you can be an industry leader that’s losing revenue from customers that don’t make it past your homepage.

Your website is the one employee working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. It can answer questions, engage and educate potential buyers and sell your product while you play golf, right slam poetry, make paper-mâché mythical creatures or whatever you like to do in your spare time.

Be current. That means don’t bother having a blog if you’re not going to update it for three years. The reality is fresh content is essential to organic search placement. Search engines don’t like websites that are stale and old. Updating your website is a habit that will help engage customers and move you up the search rankings. Creating a content calendar with the cadence and messaging what helped develop this muscle.

Photography and video can help tell your story faster and in many times more effectively than words. Today 90% of the content consumed on the Internet is video. It’s also been proven time and time again that webpage containing the video, even if it’s unrelated to the product or service, will increase the conversion on that page. Whenever possible, we recommend creating photographs instead of using stock imagery, but it’s not always possible. By using social media like Instagram, you can create a library of quality images produced by brand advocates showcasing your product.

Your website should be mobile friendly. When building the new website make sure it’s a fluid responsive site. Don’t make it hard for your potential customer to contact you once they’ve already gone to the trouble of finding your website. Mobile sites should have click to call phone numbers and location/map functionality that can provide driving directions.

Make it as easy as possible to complete a purchase. The time and money it takes to get visitors to your site, engage them to the point that they’re ready to make a purchase it is significant. Don’t fumble the ball at the 1-yard line. Checking out should be intuitive for even the least tech-savvy user. It should require as few clicks as possible

If grandma wants to buy a boosted electric skateboard for Billy, they make it as easy as Apple pie to check out and complete that $1500 purchase. Exceptional companies follow up with customers who abandon a shopping cart of items that haven’t been purchased. Then, in some cases, those same companies are able to capture between 12% to 18% of what would’ve been lost sale. Imagine if your sales people called every person, but it’s considered buy from you and was able to convert 10% of them?

The bottom line is your website is the essential part of your brand. You only get one chance to make the first impression. Don’t blow it. Contact us here to get started.