When you made the leap into the business world you knew you needed a website to grow your company. In order to achieve global domination, building your dream website is a must in your steps to success. Now that you have some skin in the game, you might feel some type of way about the return in the investment you are receiving.
As business owners, we write the plan out over and over, thinking we’ve covered every aspect. All the while, we may miss small details along the way. All the details are in the universe and you have to pay attention to all aspects of your business and site.
Here are some key questions to ask yourself about your site: important things we tend to skip over.
Are you “co-branding”?
Co-branding is when you have built your site on a third party platform, think — bigcartel, wix, square space, blogspot, these are just a few of the many. When you have built your site this way, you will leave their information all over your site. This also means the odds of you building your site from scratch are slim to none. Does your URL have the co-brand companies name in it? If yes, you need to forward and mask that, look for simple steps on GoDaddy.com. Next, on the footer of the site, does it say the name? If so, you can remove that simple line in the code and replace it with yours. Not something you know how to do? There is a fiverr freelancer for that.
Are your policies displayed?
So many small business skip over the formalities of putting their return policies and privacy & terms of service on their site. All of these pages express a right to trust for your potential customers or clients. Let’s not fail to mention– it’s very important to have them posted for legal reasons, make sure you have them displayed on your sites footer. Lastly, include these links on your site map page. An easy Google search can show you step-by-step how to implement return and privacy & terms of service.
Can you hear me? Can you hear me now?
Did you know contact forms can be broken? Simple coding errors can happen which leads email to be broken. Missing out on a plethora of emails that result in angry customers thinking you are not responding? Make sure you have your business email, contact page and a letter social icon displayed on the sites footer. You want your customers to know you are accessible, and people run to social media to speak about bad customer service all the time. Get ahead of it all by allowing your customers to have means to reach you at allotted times.
Are your social media icons pointing to your pages?
Several of my clients integrated the icons onto their sites but failed to link them to THEIR actual profiles. They were just pointing to the actual social media websites, or also mistakenly pointing to the co-branding sites social media page. Make sure yours are pointing to the correct sites. In addition, check your social media bio’s to make sure your URL is pointing to your current site. I have seen this not happen too
Are you guiding your customers?
When someone lands on your site, are they given directions or are you letting them be a kid in a candy store with free reign? If we are dealing with the latter, its time to create and use immediate calls to action. Think when you have shopped one of your favorite brands, they more than likely directed you to do something within the first 10 seconds of being on their site. You need to do the same, perhaps point them to your new merchandise or service. Launch a new line? A banner should be up telling them to view it. You need to guide your viewers into immediate action or you will lose them. These are really great for holidays or if your launching a limited edition item.
How many clicks until you get to check out?
One-two-four, or twenty clicks until your customer has placed their order? Your checkout conversion rate needs to be no more than four clicks to check out, if you can get it to two or three, amazing! Added steps make customers leave. Notice a high bounce rate on your checkout page? It might be because you require registering, or that you’ve directed them to a third party site to pay, only to be redirected back to your site. Keep checkout to a minimum, and add direct pay options like Stripe. Make sure they can add a discount code at the same time they are entering other information.
These are all super simple things you can start working on today in order to make your site visitors feel more comfortable doing business with you.
What on this list excites you most to help you see the results it can bring to your business?
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