Ten Tips to Save Your Website

By Seby Kallarakkal

Are you planning to give up on your website? Hold on. Here are ten quick steps you can take to revive your website. This article focuses on a short-term “now” steps rather than the long-term strategic steps. All action points are quick, easy and cheap to execute. At the end of implementing these steps, you can of course approach a professional web design or Internet marketing firm to help you achieve long-term goals. So here we go.

1. Know where you are NOW

Take stock of how things stand as of now. Two basic questions you might want to ask your team:

• How many leads / sales do you get from your website?
• How many visitors do you get from your website (per day or per week or per month)?

Sales team should have the answer for the first question. Check with your web master or whoever is in charge of running the website for answer to the second question. If the answer to the second question is “data not available”, insist on getting it. There are solutions available for less than $10 to know the traffic on your website. You would be surprised to see the extent of information that you can see from traffic reports.

2. Act on the insights gained from the report of point 1

Having found out the current scenario, did some thing obvious strike you? Did you think of some simple idea that could improve the scenario? If yes, go ahead and implement. If nothing really occurred to you, read on…

3. Use Google adwords to test your service

To generalize your problem, there could be two factors why your website is not working.

• You are not getting any visitors to your website
• Visitors to your websites are not convinced about your products or services

Adwords from Google would help you identify if the problem is the former or latter.

This article is not long enough to explain how it works. But here is the gist. You create a small text based advertisement that is displayed when a visitor searches using some chosen keywords in search engines. You pay only when a visitor clicks on your ad and visits your website. The great thing about this service is the amount of control you have. You can determine how much you want to pay and even from which country your ad should be displayed. Please visit https://adwords.google.com/select for more details on adwords.

The rational to use adwords is this. You can ensure some traffic to your website and then study what they are doing. If you find that even after traffic increased, your sales or leads are not picking up, it means that people who are viewing your service do not find it compelling enough. If that be the case, you as the leader would know what to do.

On the contrary if you do get traffic it means that your website is doing fine, but was lacking traffic. If that's the case, you can engage a professional Internet marketing company to increase the traffic to your website. Alternately if you have the time and resources in-house, you can start on it yourself.

4. Rewrite content on a few pages

If you had tried the previous three exercises you would know if the problem is with less traffic or a not so effective website. If it's latter, we recommend that you look at some key pages like home, about us and services. See for yourself if the description of your product or sales is clear. If it's not, rewrite the content. It helps to make your offering believable and your differentiator explicit.

5. Check how easy it is get in touch with you

If your traffic is good but leads are low, this action point can probably help you. Look at your website the way a visitor does. And try to find how to contact your company. Is it easy to find your contact information? Is there an easy to fill form? If you have given your phone number, have you made it clear when customers can call you? Ensure link to contact page is clearly visible. We would suggest ending your article or services page with an action call to contact you and a link to your contact us page section.

6. Check how fast your organization responds to web based enquiries

If E-mail or form is one of the ways in which you have chosen to be contacted, make sure your response time is good. The best way to check it for your organization is to do it yourself as a fictional potential customer. And see how fast your organization responds. Another thing you can verify is if your fictional enquiry features in the reports presented to you.

7. Make basic design changes

Believe it or not, people evaluate the credibility of your company and your website by the way your website looks. A study by persuasive labs of Stanford University found that 46.1% of the people surveyed mentioned that they use design look to evaluate credibility of websites. Since this article is focusing on quick and cheap action steps, we are not necessarily recommending a total revamp of your website. You can look at the website yourself and make some objective evaluations. Are the fonts clear and readable? Does it have unprofessional looking graphics? Are the colors used something that you would be comfortable using on your company brochure? You could make small changes that could improve the overall look and credibility of your website.

8. How good is your hosting?

We are NOT recommending top-of-the class hosting guys for everyone. But at the minimum, your website should be up for most of the time. Very few hosting company gives 100% uptime guarantee and those who give that are quite expensive. But a lot of hosting companies give 99% upwards uptime. Make sure your website is not hosted with a hosting company that might or might not exist in the next couple of months. If you want to test uptime of your website, you can use tools like netmechanic (http://www.netmechanic.com/monitor.htm)

The point is that every time your site is down, you lose business and those visitors are unlikely to come back. So it pays to make sure that your website is up.

9. When was your content last updated?

This is a good question to ask. You can ask your team when the website was updated last. Don't be surprised to see that some of the content on your website is no longer applicable. See if your new services, your new achievements, your new promotion offer, your new team, are all there on the website. Search engines like fresh content and so do visitors. Anyway it'll save you the trouble of writing embarrassing emails explaining that what you offer on website in reality is no longer available.

10. Is your site too slow?

If your website was designed by an overzealous designer, you might have ended up with a really slow website. Use the following tool to check how fast your website is. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/. Then use the same tool to test a site that you consider reasonably fast. (Might be better to choose one of your competitors website)

If you find your site is too slow, ask your technical people why it is so and see if it can be trimmed. You don't want to lose customers just because they got tired of waiting for your website to load.

To conclude

The success of your website depends on a lot of factors including the nature of your offering. If your offering is not competitive or attractive, no amount of tweaking the website would yield results. But the above steps would help you identify where the problem is, give some short-term results and help you plan for the long term strategy. And you might decide not to shut down your website after all.

What next?

Fill in our contact us form to know how Nabler can help. It would be our pleasure to assist you in making your business succeed.

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