So, you just launched a beautiful new website with tons of gorgeous photography, flashy page animations and all the latest trendy fonts you could find. It seems you've thought of everything but reality quickly sets in a month following the launch when your traffic tumbles, after everyone from your internal sales team to your HR department stops paging through your new spectacle of a site. Aside from that, you're faced with telling upper management the new site isn't attracting qualified leads or new sales and that overall performance is worse than before.
Here's a look at 5 common mistakes that can be avoided with your recent, current or upcoming website project, to prevent it from becoming nothing more than a fancy online brochure.
We live in an online world starving for fresh and relevant content, so launching a new website without even considering the integration of a company blog is only limiting your possibilities of:
The stats on the benefits of blogging don't lie either. In fact, companies that blog have 55% more site traffic on average than companies who don't, as well as 97% more inbound links to their website, which is crucial to how Google and other search engines gauge the credibility of your website and where you should rank in the SERPs.
It's fine to give away free resources on your website but the more you can package a great piece of content behind a landing page and form, the more opportunities you'll have to convert site traffic into qualified leads. The completion of conversion forms in exchange for compelling content, such as e-Books, tip sheets, white papers, etc., has become the new online currency, so make sure your site has some targeted and highly visible content offers (including integrated content offers within your blog posts) that visitors can't help but act on.
Beautiful photography and page design can go a long way with creating a pleasant user experience, but it's important to balance this visual appeal with quality page content that informs and compels the visitor to take action. In addition, Google continues to make a smarter search engine that rewards websites with the highest quality content, relevant to what is being searched. So take the time to write quality page copy aimed at the user first and the search engines second.
It's painful to see and it happens all the time, but companies continue to sabotage their established SEO efforts by launching a new website without redirecting previous page links and indexed pages. The use of 301 redirects are available for a reason so be sure to use them to your full advantage, to ensure you maintain everything you've built with your previous website.
It's time to let go of the days of keyword stuffing your website meta data and other black hat SEO techniques, in hopes of ranking high in the SERPs for every industry keyword under the sun. With the introduction of Google Panda and the penalties for over optimized websites, it's in your best interest to simplify your page optimization. Failing to do so will be detrimental to your site's visibility in organic search, preventing new leads from finding you on the web.
To learn more on how to build a website that will serve as a 24/7 salesperson to attract more qualified leads and sales, download our free guide "How to Prepare Your Website for Inbound Marketing."
Topics: Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Website Design
