Website Makeover? Or Website Pink Slip?

Could you benefit from a Website Makeover? Or should you just start over?

When you discover you’ve made a bad hire, you usually don’t hesitate to fire the person–or to provide coaching and training to fix the problem(s), so that your employee is a happy, productive, contributing member of the team.  

The same should be true of an unproductive website. You should assess your website so that you can determine whether you can fix it with a Website Makeover — or junk it, and start over.  

Your website represents you. Some might even say, it is you. A finely tuned website could be working for you around the clock–helping spread the word about what you do, how you do it better than anyone, and creating opportunities with customers and prospects who need your products or services.  

I realize that others have put together lists of factors that create a productive website, but I put this list together specifically for small business owners to help them determine if they could benefit from a Website Makeover. If I’ve forgotten anything please feel free to add yours in the comment form!  

7 Factors to Determine Whether a Website Makeover would work for you:

1. Code/structure: Is the website coded properly to build keyword densities for the main key phrases on each page?
2. Backwards Links–Do other influential websites link back to yours? Along with the code and structure, this is the #1 factor that influences your search engine visibility. 
3. Usability–Does your website follow accepted conventions of usability? Is it easy to use? Can the website be viewed in all browsers? Are there any bottlenecks or broken links? Or information that needs to be updated?
4. Identity/positioning–Does your website accurately capture your identity and position you as a leader in your field? Does it accurately and positively reflect you and your business?
5. Content–Does your website offer fresh, relevant content to engage your readers? Does it speak directly to your customers and prospects and accurately communicate what you can do to help them?
6. Capture/convert–Is your objective to generate inquiries, leads, or sales? Does your website help you achieve your objective? Does it have web forms, invitations to chat, and/or social media buttons? Do you offer an e-book or something else of value to get prospects to sign up for your newsletter?
7. Measure–Are you using Google Analytics, WP Stats, or something else to measure your success? You can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Do a Website Assessment

One of the best ways to assess where your website is in relation to other websites is the Website Grader, a free tool from HubSpot that provides an Internet Marketing Report for your website. It tells you how well your website is working… if it’s getting traffic, if it has SEO problems, how popular is it in social media… it’ll give you a step-by-step guide to fix it so you can start getting more inbound traffic. [This website scored a 97.8 of 100].  

How does your website rank? Is it time to give your website the Pink Slip, or can you fix it up with a Website Makeover so it’s working for you? What do you need to do to fix it up?  

No matter how good your website is, there is always room for improvement.

If you need help either analyzing your website, fixing up your current website with a Website Makeover, or building a new website, please contact me.

1 Comment

• BizSugar.com May 24, 2010 at 12:50 pm

  Should You Give Your Website the Pink Slip?…

  When a small business owner discovers they’ve made a bad hire, most don’t hesitate to fire the person–or to provide coaching and training to get the employee up to speed, so that they’re a productive, contributing member of the team. The same should be…

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