Websites Are For Life And Not Just For Christmas

Websites are for life and not just for Christmas

Everybody gets excited about the launch of their latest website.

You have to come to terms with all sorts of new words: search engine optimisation, meta tags, usability. You find yourself having to put in writing how good your business is. And of course there is the alluring promise of reaching out to untapped markets and attracting new customers.

But in the experience of the National B2B Centre the excitement wears off pretty quickly and the website, and all of the ancillary tasks associated with making it work, gets pushed down the priority list.

Gareth Edwards, B2B Centre Associate eMarketing Consultant, examines why your website needs long term attention to keep delivering value to your business.

In the Beginning

Let’s paint a picture of the situation that I hope SMEs find themselves in when they get a website developed for them – our experience is that it doesn’t always happen for them.

1. They have a plan that spells out what the site is for, who is it targeted at and precisely what they want to achieve. The objectives are very clear and very detailed and tie in with both the overall business objectives and the objectives of offline or traditional marketing.

2. A website developer or designer creates an attractive “look and feel” for the site. The brand, the company’ products, its team or its premises are portrayed in a good light. Site visitors aren’t going to be put off when they arrive.

3. The structure and layout of the site is conducive to navigation and usability. In other words it follows the de facto standards of web use and, for instance, a click on the company logo (sited in the top left corner) takes visitors back to the home page. Other usability features would include minimising the amount of information visitors are expected to enter to, say, register for a newsletter.

4. The words and the pictures are effective in spelling out who the company is, what it does, why its products and services are so good, and why prospects should buy from them. All of the pages back each other up in telling the story of how good you are and each page has a strong “call to action” that encourages the visitor to take a step towards purchase or enquiry and makes that message as clear and simple as possible.

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been carried out to make sure that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN know that the site exists, recognise the keywords and phrases that you want to be highly ranked on (because they have been placed in meta tags and page text), and can see links from other well regarded sites to yours.

6. Somebody in the business has been trained in using editing tools to allow simple changes to site text or better still a content management system has been used to make it really easy. Web stats are made available to help understand traffic volumes and an analytics package has been installed to show what do when they reach the site (e.g. how did they navigate to the site in the first place and what pages did they visit).

{mospagebreak}

What Happens Next?

The site goes live and everybody breathes a sigh of relief. No more bills for developers and no more late nights trying to write website copy – it’s hard isn’t it?

Now, the site has been set up reasonably well. SEO has ensured that searchers are finding the site on the front page of the search engines for your chosen keywords. Visitors are reaching the site and seem to be finding products and information the need. You make some online sales and the phone starts to ring with people making appointments to talk to you.

This carries on for several months but slowly things quiet down: fewer hits, fewer sales, fewer enquiries and lower search engine rankings. You launch a new product and….nothing happens. Nobody said anything about this.

So what’s going on?

It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint

There are quite a few factors at work here. Some of them are about the way search engines work, some of them are about the way your site has been developed and some of them are about the way you. Let’s looks at some of the reasons in more detail.

• Search engines look for change and may assume that your information is less relevant if you don’t update it – this can affect your keyword ranking. This may also lead them to reduce the frequency with which they return to check your site – bad news if you decide to launch a new product because your new web pages may not get picked up in time.

• Search engines alter their criteria for deciding what’s good and what’s bad in terms of design, content and links (if your site uses frames then I hope you are aware that it is not helpful to SEO). It is important to keep abreast of changes so you can take out bad features or include good ones.

• Your business is a dynamic entity, isn’t it? You will need to change the website to include information about new products and services, new staff, awards and big customer wins. All of this content is there to support the sales process. It helps to convince prospects that they should do business with you. If it doesn’t change people will make the assumption that you haven’t changed either.

• It takes some time to recognise and then master the tools and techniques available to manage your site. Regular use of, for instance, an analytics package such as Google Analytics will help you to understand where visitors are from, what search terms they used to find you and how they navigated around the site. And if you don’t like what you see you should be able make changes.

• Your rivals are reading this article too! If competitors use SEO on their websites more effectively than you then they could appear higher up the search engine rankings. If their sites are better structured and their information is more meaningful then they are also likely to increase queries and sales and get repeat visitors. You also need to know that the number of websites continues to grow dramatically (Netcraft recorded an increase of 7.2 million between August and September alone) so there is likely to be a natural increase in competition for visitors anyway.

• Every page that you publish has the potential to be read, assessed for relevance and have its keywords ranked by search engines. Every relevant external link to your site has a positive affect too. It’s another good reason for continually adding content and making sure that you follow the basic rules of search engine optimisation. If you don’t do it then remember you competition probably will.

• Your prospects and clients are getting more experienced in using internet technologies of all kinds.  People are learning how to more accurately define their searches to get better results. If they are adding a brand name to a search for a product or the name of their region will your site still be found?  They are using social networking sites (Facebook, Linkedin etc.) to find people, products and services. They may stop using the directories where you first registered your domain. Do you have a social networking presence?  They are starting to use mobile devices to access the web more frequently. Not many websites work effectively on them, the ones that do may have an immediate advantage.

• Did customers just get bored with the “same old, same old” on your site. You might like the concept of rebranding or changing the style but if you are selling personal services or fashion items then it probably goes with the territory.

• Keeping your website tuned for maximum performance is hard work – you probably already know that. There isn’t a magic bullet to guarantee success. Instead success is built on lots and lots of small changes which have a cumulative effect. This means you have to make time to do it yourself or bite the bullet and get somebody to do it for you.

{mospagebreak}

Making it Work

The key to winning ways is to plan or at least remember to carry out some of the activities. You will have got the drift of many of the requirements for keeping your website going from the section above. The next list highlights some recommendations for both activities and timescales. If you really don’t enjoy playing around with your website then try the little and often approach.

1. Keep measuring and monitoring. Not all of our clients realise that website statistics are often provided free by your hosting company. Google Analytics and software like Statcounter are free so there is no excuse not to have them. But you must look at the information at least twice a month to make sure that you spot any trends.

2. Get customers or trusted advisers to evaluate any big changes you make to navigation and content….before it goes live. Sign for Dr Jakob Nielsen's "Use-it" newsletter to find out how it should be done. If the style gurus in your industry are signalling a change then take heed.

3. Review your SEO at least once a month. The B2B Centre website now includes a free to use SEO Tool to help you evaluate how well your site is optimised and provide support in improving it.

4. Keep information up to date. The best approach is to reflect changes in what you do on the site immediately. Realistically this means weekly.

5. Blow your own trumpet. Publishing articles, blogs and press releases fulfils two requirements. Firstly important information about you and your products and services is available to a wider audience. Secondly every link back to your site from a reputable source enhances your site’s reputation. The B2B site contains articles on how to set up blogs, how to write good website content and how to use “anchor text” to make inbound links even more effective. If you can get into the habit it is possible to dash off a blog in 15 to 20 minutes – could you do that every couple of days?

6. Keep abreast of new technology and new techniques. The B2B Centre issues a monthly newsletter and we try to explain what’s going on in the technology world in layman’s terms. There are lots of other sites, newsletters and blogs that provide helpful information in varying degrees of “Geek Speak”. Examples include; eMarketer , searchenginewatch.com and anything by Matt Cutts (one of Google’s software engineers). Try a search on YouTube to find Matt explaining Google’s views on SEO in person.

7. Take a look at what your competitors are doing. Our August newsletter included details on competitor evaluation and I would recommend perhaps a quarterly review of their website and other eMarketing activity to keep yourself in touch, more if your sector is particularly web oriented. At the same time use networking to get up to date titbits. You will need to respond appropriately…..and that might mean anything from a complete site redevelopment to some tweaking of text.

Keep It Up

As we have seen websites aren’t a one-off experience. Out clients, companies like Rainbow Signs and Safety , Inserts Direct , Gillian Wesley Designs , MTB-Bitz have all been able to apply the principles outlined in this article. They have maintained or improved the performance of their websites over time within the time and resources they have available.

So can you.