Expand2Web Podcast #15 PDF Edition The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Websites Show notes at: http://www.expand2web.com/session15 This is the Expand2Web podcast with Don Campbell, session 15: Seven Habits of Highly Effective Websites. Welcome to the Expand2Web podcast where it s all about making your business successful online. Now your host: Don Campbell. Welcome again everybody. Don Campbell here and this week I d like to talk about successful websites and what makes them successful. We spend so much time trying to get our websites to rank in the search results. What happens when someone actually clicks through and comes to our website? Get your website get the deal done? Can it educate your customers? Can it meet the goals that you have for it? That s what I want to talk about this time. In Expand2Web we work with thousands of businesses because both directly and indirectly because we sell the SmallBiz WordPress Theme and we ve worked with a lot of customers through our membership site and just through working with tons and tons of businesses. There are a few things that I ve seen that have worked really well. I ve seen a lot of different kinds of websites. Really the purpose of this podcast is to dig into that and 4igure out what are those elements that really make a website successful and productive. This is really important because there was a study in the UK last year that showed they surveyed a few thousand business owners and they found that 46 I m sorry. They surveyed a few thousand customers and they said that 46 percent of these people that they surveyed said that they d actually cancelled plans to do business with someone just because of the website. That means they were looking for a particular goods or services and they went to Google and did some searching and found a website and they decided wow, just not sure. This website hasn t been updated for a couple of years or just doesn t look very interesting and they ve moved on to a different website. What happens is studies have shown, usability studies have shown that you only have three to seven seconds to convince someone that your website is relevant for them and then they just move on. You ve got to make that impression right away. Your website has to be really clear in leaving
impression on someone. That s why I want to talk about these Seven Habits of Highly Effective Websites. These are things that I ve seen to make the websites productive and successful. Let s dive into those right now. Habit #1: Simple Design and Navigation The Virst habit is simple design and navigation. Your website does not need to be Vlashy. It just needs to be simple and professional. Make it easy for people to understand what your site is about and how to navigate it. I ve talked to a lot of businesses who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their Vlashy website. They want this gorgeous website with all these cool features on it but it hasn t helped them and they re confused. They re struggling to try and Vind out wow, I put all those money into the website it s just not doing for me. That s really one of the dilemmas. I see a lot of people that do that, a lot of them approach their website as an online brochure when really your website is a chance to make a relationship with potential customers. It s a chance to educate them, it s a chance to share with them and it s a chance to eventually a longer term relationship if you do it right. That all starts with just a very simple design. It doesn t mean it can t look good. Just don t go overboard on animated things and crazy stuff when really what you want to do is you want someone to know very, very quickly what your website s about. Habit #2: Make it Personal (with your picture) The second tip for a great website is to put your picture on it. A lot of people are shy and they don t want to put their picture out there but it turns out it s really important because people don t buy things from anonymous websites. They buy from people. They want that person interaction. If they go your website and they can t tell who s behind that or what it s about or who even the business owner is, they re just going to go somewhere else. There s a reason why your about page is typically the second most visited page on your website and that s because people want to know, Hey who is this? Who s behind this website? A surprising number of websites out there don t have a picture and we can t really say who the person is. Think about that for your website. As we re going through this, think about which of these fundamental things your website has or doesn t have and what you can do to address them. If you don t have a picture on your homepage or at least on your about page of you, the business owner, or of the doctor or of your smiling receptionist or your staff or something like that, then you really need to think about that. Ideally, you want real graphics from your business. You don t want stock photography. You want to take raw pictures and put them out there and help people know what it s going to feel like to visit your little occasion or to work with you. That s so important.
It s amazing the number of websites that I see that just don t do this. There are good reasons. Some people don t want to put their picture out there or they re a little bit shy, but all I can say is it s going to make a really big difference. You re going to get a lot more engagement and a lot more of a personal feel to your website. Habit #3: Ask for Action The third habit of successful websites is you need to ask for action. Once someone comes to your website, you need to ask them for action. You need to ask for that appointment or request or ask for them to sign up to your email list. You need to ask for what it is that you want. Maybe that s a free trial, maybe it s to buy, but so many websites don t do that. They don t really give the user or the visitor a path and say, Here s what I want you to do. If you like what you see call us for an appointment. We ll be glad to get you in and have a free consultation, or whatever it may be, you need to have that. Take a look around at some other websites. You ll see Amazon they do a great job of this and even a lot of prominent websites will do a really good job of asking for action. You can do this in a classy way. It doesn t have to be a big Vlashing button with arrows on it. Once you ve educated someone and shared some information with them, you can ask for the result. It s really important to do this and make it clear on your homepage or whatever page that they re on what you want them to do next. Habit #4: Publish Unique Content Regularly The fourth habit of these highly effective websites just to review, the Virst one is simple design and navigation. The second one is to make it personal by putting your picture on it. The third is to ask for action. The fourth is to publish unique content regularly. Publishing unique content to your website on a regular basis is really, really important. Every time you publish a new article or blog post out there, Google comes back and cross your website again. This content can be optimized for the keyword phrases that you care about and for your physical location. Every one of those articles is a chance for someone to Vind your business. The more of those that you have out there, the more chances you re going to have. It s super important. For a business website, this could mean publishing information about your products or services. It could be publishing information about each of your locations that you do business out of. It could be publishing information about the common questions that your customers have or even case studies of some of the things your customers are doing and you ve helped them with. There s so many great ideas for content and you can always get help from really skilled writers on line two if you can t write this yourself.
Sites with blogs, websites with blogs get 55 percent more traf4ic than websites with don t. The reason for this is because blogs make it easy to update your website. That means more content, more fresh content Google comes back to your site and cross it again and so it s really, really important. You get a bigger footprint in the Google search results this way because you have more content that Google is coming back and crawling. You get better social engagement because people are sharing links to your articles with each other on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. You get more links from other websites which are important for your search ranking. Those are the reasons why websites with blogs on them get more trafvic. Habit #5: Syndicate Your Content The Vifth habit of these highly effective websites is to syndicate your content. When you make an investment in creating this unique content, you can reuse it for other purposes too. It doesn t just go to your blog. Every blog has what s called an RSS feed and allows you to syndicate your content. This is one of the reasons why I suggest to small business owners to look at WordPress as a platform for their website because you can instantly have the blogging capabilities built right in and you can syndicate your content with this RSS feed and this can be used in a lot of different ways. You can use this content. You can publish snippets of it for Facebook updates and Twitter updates. You can publish it on Google Plus. You can use it in your email newsletter. You can use it in a lot of different areas. That s why it s important to basically have this original content because now you can syndicate that and get it out into other places and extend the reach of your website. Your website becomes the hub of your online presence and a solid content plan is the engine that drives that. The other great thing about having this content out there in reaching out onto these other networks is that you the put yourself where your potential customers are. Some of them might react better to receiving an email from you. Some of them might react better Vinding you on Facebook or maybe reading your blog, but you get tagged out there and educate and help them to understand things they need to understand. They d learn to trust you more and then that could lead to them being customer. Habit #6: Measure Your Results The sixth habit of highly effective websites is to measure the results of your websites. You want to know how many people come to it everyday. What keywords did they use to Vind it? Where are they coming from? Luckily, Google provides a free tool for all this. It s called Google Analytics. What s great is once you ve implemented this you have a baseline and you can start to see what happens to your trafvic as you do different things.
If you start blogging more you can see wow, my trafvic s going up. Even if you did a print campaign that included your website URL, you can see if that affected your website trafvic. There are a lot of reasons that you want to be measuring this and you can do this in some really simple ways. Google Analytics, as I mentioned, is a free tool. It s pretty easy to setup and you can even convigure it to email your report every week if you want. You can do some pretty cool stuff with it so it s something you d devinitely want to look at and start to measure the results. You can optimize what you re doing and get better results that way too. Habit #7: Be Mobile Ready The seventh thing I have, the seventh habit for highly effective websites is to be mobile and ready. According to Gartner research, in 2013 more people will use mobile devices than PCs to get online. That s a big deal. We see people with smart phones and with tablets and all these things. They re ubiquitous now and the nice thing about the new modern smart phones is that they can read regular websites. They have mini browsers in them. That s cool. Your website will probably come up but the problem is most websites don t react. They don t have any idea what device they re being displayed on. You want your website to be smarter than that. You want your website to know hey, what size is the device this person is looking at it on. Let me make it easier for them to see things or to touch things, to make a phone call or get map or directions. When you look at a standard website on your smart phone, you probably have seen this, you pull up the website but it s so tiny that you have to pinch and zoom around with your Vingers and pan around on the page to try and see, to read what you want to read and it s really, really hard. Some people call that putting your customer in pinch and zoom hell. That s my favorite phrase for that. You don t want to do that. You want to display bigger texts with a nice button out there that says call today. All they have to do is touch it. It s easier for them to touch with their Vinger or maybe a button to get map and directions or to send you an email. You want to have that easily readable. To do this, there are plenty of tools out there. A lot of themes now, a lot of the WordPress themes are what they call responsive themes, which means that the content skills and changes based on the screen size. You can also do mobile landing pages. They re specivic for mobile devices and those tools out there are not expensive. You want to get out there with a mobile enabled website like this. The other reason you want to do it is that 85 percent of small business owners do not have any mobile version of their websites. If you do, it really helps you stand out from the crowd. It s a time of opportunities. You want to get out
there now and make that happen and it s a good way for you to standout you re your competition and get a hand of the curve. We just reviewed these seven habits and talked about some of the things that make successful websites, but you probably noticed for each this there s a little bit of thinking that needs to go on before you can do them. There are really two key questions that I recommend people ask themselves before they go into this. Key Question #1: The Virst question is what is your goal? What is the goal for your website? It could be e- commerce. This sounds like a simple question but it isn t really because a lot of times you have multiple goals, a lot of times people aren t exactly sure they haven t talked about it. Depending on what kind of business you have or what your objectives are, that can change what you want to do with your website. Some of the goals, some of the most common goals I hear of are commerce. Maybe people want, maybe you want someone to buy something off of your website, right? That s one goal. Another goal might be lead capture. Maybe you just want to get someone on to your email list or maybe you want to get some information about them that you can follow up with them later. Another goal might be to educate and inform. I see a lot of really good websites that go out of their way to educate customers in their market and establish some authority and credibility Virst and then they can follow later with other types of questions and maybe become customers if it s Vit. Another goal might be to request an appointment. If you re a service oriented business, if you re a doctor, maybe you want a patient, a chiropractor or a dentist or an optometrist or something like that, you might want someone to come to your website and learn and then sign up for an appointment. Maybe another goal could be customer service where you re helping customers who ve bought your product. There are a lot of different things that a website can do but for any given page on your website, you really need to think about what is my goal here. You don t want to have four or Vive different things going on on the page. You want one goal per page. Overall, your homepage being the most important page on your site typically for a small business, it s important to identify what this goal is and then you can ask for action. Some of the other things we talked about fall into place once you re clear about what your goal is. Key Question #2:
The other key question that you should ask yourself is who is my audience? Who is it exactly? Can I describe them in detail? A lot of companies invest of time in this. Bigger companies with a lot of resources, what they ll do is they ll create a persona. They ll actually name the person. They ll say our customer we re going to call her Sally and she is in this age group with this demographic and she drives this car and has this many kids and they go to sport games or whatever. They describe in details. They understand who their audience is and they understand what their problems are and what they need. How can I best help them? The other thing you need to ask is just what do I want them to do. Once you know what your goal is and you truly understand your audience, the people are coming to your website then you can cater the content to them better. You can help them more. You can ask them for action and it really all comes together. It here s the important part: you need to look at your website and I suggest you do this after this podcast if you haven t done this in a while. Really look at your website and ask yourself, Is this website tailored to my customer, to my potential customer or is it more tailored to me? Big mistake I see a lot of times of websites that they re out there and they say, We re the best business in town for auto repair. We ve been serving this community for 35 years. We ve got all these certivications. It s built all totally tailored toward the business, it s not tailored to what you can do for your customer. That s what s really important here. Pro Tip: Do a Usability Study (here s a free and easy way) A little tip on something you probably have heard that big companies do these things use the usability test. There s a really neat thing you can do for your website, probably better than any usability test and trust me, this really works. What you need to do is you need to be able to see your website through your customer s eyes. That s really hard to do because when you own a certain type of business you know all about that business and there s they call it the curse of knowledge. I Virst heard this term in a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. It s something when you re so invested and you re so deep into something that it s almost impossible for you to see it like a newcomer, like a new person because you have built up all this knowledge and experience around this issue whether it s a type of a business or it s a problem you re solving or whatever. Your job is to Vigure out what would a brand new customer would see when they came to my website? Would they understand what it s about? Would I
be helping in them in some way to build trust with them? Would they be compelled to take action and contact me? The best way to do this is to Vind a few people. This could be potentially family members if they re not living day in and day out with the business. It could be friends. It could be other acquaintances. Get them to spend 10 or 15 minutes with you and go meet them at the coffee shop or wherever, at your ofvice, and sit them down in front of the computer with your website up and give them a goal. Say, I want you to Vind out about this, or I want you to schedule an appointment, or I want you to sign up for our email newsletter. Give them a goal and then let them go through your website. Here s the important part: do not say anything. They are going to be moving around and getting lost and clicking on the wrong things and it s going to drive you crazy but you can t guide them, you can t say anything. Just watch and you will be amazed at what you re going to learn about your website. I ve done this and I keep doing it and I can never do it enough. If you do that with only three people, you ll be amazed at the feedback that you get. Just three to Vive people is all it takes. I try to do this every six months or every year or more if I can and really sit them down and just see and you ll learn so much about what s going on in your website. They re going to click on things and move around and do things that you never expected. That s a really great little, a mini usability test that s free and you can do that for your website and improve your website quite a bit after an experience like that. I want to summarize here the seven habits of highly successful websites. Again, this is based on working with lots and lots of business owners and seeing a lot of great websites and a lot of bad ones and helping a lot of businesses really practically improve their website in a way that delivers business to them. These are not super hard to do but you really need to ask yourself those two key questions, what is my goal and who is my audience, and then implement those things on your website. The Virst habit is simple design and navigation. Make sure that when someone comes to your website they know what it s about very, very quickly and they know how to move around on your website and Vind what they need. Number two is make it personal. Put your picture on your website or your receptionist s picture or somebody that your customers can relate to and they know, hey this is a real person on the side of this website. This is not just another crappy anonymous website out there on the web. This person is someone I could potentially know. I know what it looks like, their ofvice looks like or I know what the people look like. It s very important.
Number three is ask for action. You know who your customer is, you know what goal is, ask for that sign up, ask for that appointment. People are going to come to your website. It s going to be personal. They re going to see good content. They re going to say I could trust this person. Ask them for that action. Number four is create unique content and publish that to your website regularly. You want to continue to update your website to get more content out there, get Google continuing to come back and re- index your site, adding more and more pages to their index. That s going to help you so much and like we said, blogs get 55 percent more trafvic than typical websites because they re updated frequently. The Vifth tip is syndicate your contents. Now that you re building this content and you re publishing it, use that to feed your social media channels, your email newsletter. Reuse that content and get some mileage out of it so that your blog and website become the hub of your online presence. Number six is measure and optimize. Use a tool like Google Analytics so that you know how much trafvic is coming to your website on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, that you know what keywords people are using to Vind your website, that you know where they re coming from. All these things you re going to learn so much just by a few basic things of measuring your website. You can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and the other marketing that you re doing. Number seven is to be mobile ready. Make sure that you re delivering a mobile experience to your visitors instead of just taking them in pinches and hell and making them squeeze around, pan around on their smart phone to try and Vind out information off your site. Mobile visitors, according to usability studies, are very goal oriented. They re different than people sitting behind their desks somewhere. They re usually in their car or walking down the street, they have a specivic goal in mind. They spend less time on your website. They view less pages on your website. They re looking to get something done so you need to make that easy for them when they come to your website on a mobile device. That s what I have for you. Those seven tips if you are able to do that to your website, even a few of these things, it s going to make a big difference for you and it s going to answer that question, How can I make my website work for me? How can I get results from my website? Take a look at those and let me know if you have any questions in the show notes. I m going to have, as I always do, I ll have a show notes out there. They will be at http://www.expand2web.com/session15. From there I ll have some links to things that I mentioned in here, there s comments.
As always, I love to hear from you guys so let me know what you think. Thanks for tuning in and good luck with your website and let me know how you re doing and we ll talk soon. Take care. All right, well, until next week. p.s. If you need a website for your business, check out our SmallBiz WordPress Theme - it is a responsive theme that makes it easy to build a website for your business, complete with website, blog, Facebook and Mobile all in one package. Click Here to subscribe to the Expand2Web Small Business Podcast on itunes!