Why Your Website is Worthless
By Sarah Simmons
You may have put a lot of money, resources and hours into your website, but if it’s not reaching your target demographic and generating business, your website is worthless! A website that seemed great a couple of years ago is probably not doing the job nowadays without any updates. Read on to find out why your website just isn’t cutting it anymore.
TMI
The popular web acronym TMI, or too much information, doesn’t just apply to people – your website can have TMI too! If people find too much information about your product or service on your site, they won’t be motivated to call you and find out more. Words or text on your website don’t always convey what you are able to do and whether or not you are reliable. Too much information on your website can prohibit the “person to person” sales techniques that have worked for businesses for many years.
Too Little Information/Poor Navigation
While you don’t want to give visitors too much information, you don’t want to leave them in the dark either. If your site has too little information, or poor navigation prevents users from finding the things they want to know, you’re unlikely to get any business.
A Case of Sloppy Site-itis
Sloppy site-itis is how I would diagnose sites that look like the website equivalent of Pig-Pen from the comic strip Peanuts. If your website looks like it was put together in about 5 minutes, without any thought or care, why should someone trust you to put time into their product or service? As little as one hour of maintenance can make a world of difference to the look of your site. Go through your site and make sure all the links work, check for spelling errors, and make sure all formatting, fonts and colors are consistent throughout the site. After a while it’s easy to miss mistakes that you’ve been looking at every day, so it’s a great idea to have a friend check for you too.
People Can’t Find Your Website
More and more consumers are turning to the internet to find the goods or services they need. The most important reason why your website is worthless is if people do not know about your website. You could have a multi-million dollar design, and the best product available, but if people can’t find your website, it can’t generate business. This is simple enough to understand, but short of standing on the corner waving a sign with your web address on it, how can you help people find your website?
Get on the A-List
If you’re not listed with a business directory on the top search engines, many times your website will slip through the cracks. To generate more business it may help to put your website out there on business directories along with a brief ad describing what you do. Ads that are easy to read, informative, to the point, and don’t overload the customer with information they don’t need to know are best.
You don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel, just do your research. See what your competitors are doing; look around on Google and Yahoo! to see what is ranking, and go with what is proven
One of the easiest ways to find reputable online advertising companies and business directories is to Google the keywords you think your customers would search for. When the page pulls up, scroll through the links on the first page and find a good business directory. Getting your website seen through multiple linkings on top business directories will help your website rankings and give you the business boost you need.
Sarah Simmons – TenList creates a win-win situation by connecting local businesses with local customers to provide a business directory with True Local Results for all. For a fraction of what other business directories charge, TenList can drive unlimited search engine traffic to your business.4
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com