As a marketeer, it is my job to help people achieve measurable growth and one of the most common questions I get asked is “how can I make my website work for me?”. I could write a series of articles on the subject of websites and business growth but in this, the second of our marketing columns in Today’s Wills and Probate, we are going to provide some guidance around what you should be doing to improve the performance of your website as part of continual efforts towards marketing.
Tip one – improve your SEO
As a follow up to our most recent (and first) column, you should look at your SEO. You don’t have to spend thousands of pounds to improve your SEO and but you should start to look at your digital footprint, your website and how it’s performing. Start with website analytics. Look at your bounce rate (the number of people who leave your website after a visit). Look at where you appear in the rankings and compare this against geographic competitors.
Tip two – make sure that your website doesn’t lack “calls to action”
A call to action (CTA) is a request for the visitor to do something:
- Read more
- Click here
- Contact us etc.
Lots of websites lack any CTAs at all and some don’t have very clear or commanding ones. Make sure that each page has one (often to capture information). You can promote the CTAs by making them prominent on a page, by putting them in white space or even by incentivizing them or using Lead Magnets.
Tip three – optimise the performance of your website
People lack patience, so if they are made to wait by slow loading pages or images, they will leave your site in search of a faster or more efficient one. You can get analysis on page loading speeds. It’s also important to recognise that your loading speeds may differ for mobile and desktop so check this too. You might need to compress images to make the page loading speeds faster.
Tip four – make it easy for people to contact you
One of my biggest website bugbears is that people don’t make contact information or information capture readily accessible. All you need to do is include your contact details in your header or footer, and have calls to action encouraging people to contact you across the site. Better still, have contact forms across the website where clients can email as they browse. Without readily available contact information, you might risk losing a prospective client to a competitor whose user experience is better. A little market research here will always come in handy.
Tip five – fix broken links and pages
You could be penalised by the algorithms if you have pages that:
- Don’t exist
- Are broken
- Have broken links
The key here is to analyse links on your website and ensure that they go to where they should and that the destination pages have content on them and are up to date.
These are five simple tips, but five tips that can help your website to perform better and to hopefully increase your chances of information capture, getting better traffic and achieving Legal Growth.
