posted by Nicolette Beard @ 6:27 PM
With 82%* of consumers using a search engine as their first step in researching a product or service locally, developing a company website is critical to long term business success.
But what happens once the site is launched? Without a content strategy or goals for building and maintaining a web presence, your site will become a “tombstone,” as Lee Odden so aptly phrased it on his online marketing blog.
A tombstone website is one in which the content is static. In other words, DEAD.
Search engines don’t visit static websites often, which hinders your search visibility. Google likes sites with fresh, frequent, relevant content. They’re in business to serve up the best, most accurate and authoritative results. When you stop feeding their “bots,” you are invisible to them.
More importantly, your customer or prospect won’t stop by either, limiting your ability to engage, communicate and convert that visitor to a buyer.
Worse than dated content, however, is an out-of-date design. If you spend any time online, you may have noticed that websites today are less cluttered, easier to navigate, incorporate social aspects and take advantage of the wider computer screen widths and crisper resolutions.
If you think of your website Home page as your “front door,” ask yourself if you’d be embarrassed to invite your boss or coworker over for dinner. What would they encounter? Rusty tools leaning against the doorjamb?
Not having a website is no longer an option for businesses today. Having a website that works is crucial to your online health and longevity.
If you want your visitors to feel welcome and prolong their visit, make it easy for them to stay. Slow loading pages, poorly laid out navigation, flash intros, dated material, all point to a tombstone website.
And if you don’t want your visitors hitting the back button, please don’t have your brother-in-law’s mother’s cousin redesign your website.
*Source: LocalConnex
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1.25.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 2:34 PM
Digital media has turned traditional news sourcing on its head. Journalists now set up news alerts and RSS feeds to track industry news, companies and subject matter experts.
So when a journalist visits your online press room and discovers a plethora of PDF-downloads, what do you think his/her reaction might be?
1) Exit stage left. One extra click is not worth my time.
2) I’ll download the document and may write about you, but I’ll make my displeasure known. (“Hey, I’m only human.”)
3) This is so 90s. Is there a more cutting-edge company worth investigating?
The above imagined scenarios can be measured in higher bounce rates, fewer downloads and infrequent news stories and/or interviews in major news outlets.
When you make your content less accessible, you want to factor in “lost opportunity” costs.
From a technology viewpoint, while it’s true that search engines can now “read” news releases, presenting your news only in PDFs is making a search engine work too hard. If you must post PDFs, be certain you have an HTML version, an RSS feed and submit to newswire services.
If you assume that your audience is accessing your site on a computer or Smartphone equipped with the necessary software to decode the document, you could be right. You also could be wrong.
Key influencers and early adopters are increasingly using mobile applications. You don’t want anything to impede deadline-driven news or to dissuade a potential investor.
If you make your content hard to find, you may find yourself victim of The Law of Unintended Consequences. In other words, you don’t want to overly frustrate your key constituents, whether they are journalists or investors, by making them work, search, click, download and read, over and over again.
Good user experience isn’t a concept limited to ecommerce sites.
Resources: 5 Reasons Why Your Press Page Should Lose the PDFs
