Your website is your business
What we mean by that is that your web site is a window on your business. Visitors will look at your site and base their opinions of your company on your web site.
What do they see?
- An expert?
- Something brimming with useful information, giving them confidence in you and your staff?
- A dated site that's dated and difficult to read on their smart phone?
- Very little information beyond your contact details?
You've probably done this yourself - searched for something online, visited a site and made a decision on whether to contact the company or not based on your experience of that web site. It's quite possible that the company that you dismissed based on their web site is very good - it's just that their web site was built years ago and hasn't had any content or design updates since. It's a fairly typical situation, web sites are sometimes viewed as a 'thing' or a commodity - you buy one, it goes online and then you forget about it until you need to move premises or decide to change the company logo. If that's you, or your clients, then you're missing out.
Your web site is a window into your business
Or at least, that's how your customers are treating it - and that's how you need to treat it too. What do you want people to see when they look through your window?
One of the following lists ( or a mixture of them ) may match your ideas:
- Professionalism
- Expertise
- Customer service
Or
- Cost effectiveness
- Efficiency
- No messing about
- Speed
Or
- Friendliness
- Competence
- Timeliness
- Reliability
The web is the #1 way that your customers are searching for you. Are they going to find you or someone else and what does a collection of out of date information say about you?
If you don't stay ahead and keep your marketing going then you'll go backwards, your site needs to reflect your business - otherwise you'll miss the customers you serve best, and catch the ones you don't.
Are you good at what you do? Are you the company people should come to - or should they really go to those guys round the corner?
Your customers and Google are looking for pretty much the same things - they both like experts. Make your site reflect that you're the best/cheapest/fastest - or whatever your niche is - at what you do and good things will happen. Build your site to reflect your business and Google will recognise that you know what you're talking about, then it will send you more customers, those customers will read your site and realise you know what you're talking about and they'll get in touch.
Nice.