news & insights

In the wake of COVID-19 maintaining sales is King. Your website has never been more important. It is an essential element of your sales toolkit, whether you sell products online or not and it is the best brand ambassador you’ll ever have; always on script and working 24/7. Now is the time to ensure it is Google’s best friend, the content is hyper-relevant for your desired target market and that the user experience is fine tuned to convert leads into sales.

Here at Tiny Hunter, we thought it would be helpful to let you know potential ways to get more return out of your site and increase connection with your audience. It has never been more important to spend the time ensuring it is in the best possible shape it can be.

We have broken it down to 4 key areas to focus on. We recommend you assess these and give them a rating of urgent, average or good to focus your efforts at this time.

HOW IS YOUR SITE TECHNICALLY PERFORMING?

• Site speed. This is something that a web developer can look into for you. 53% of users abandon sites that take longer than three seconds to load so this is important.
• Clear, logical and intuitive navigation structure. View your navigation through the eyes of your customer. Don’t think about what you call your products or how you structure your business. Think about naming your navigation in terms your customers will relate to.
• Cross links/promo areas to encourage exploration of the site. Make it as easy as possible for those who visit your site. Link them through to other relevant pages or offers. Don’t rely on them to seek things out. They should never reach a dead end.
• Easily identifiable links throughout the site. Once you have put links in your content make sure they are easy to see; make them a different colour, underline them. Again, make it as easy as possible for the user.
• Good usability on mobiles and tablets. There’s a high chance someone is looking at your site while binge watching on netflix or making dinner for the kids. It has to work well on mobile and tablet. Spend an hour clicking around your site on your mobile, note where you get confused or frustrated. Get those barriers removed. Often you will find simplifying for the mobile experience will improve the desktop experience too.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS & GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

If you don’t have these, install them. Today. Right now. They provide invaluable insights on what people do on your site, how they get there, how long they spend per page. The list goes on. All of this will help focus your efforts on what should be addressed first.

• Site visits. How many people are coming to your site and how long do they spend? What are the most visited pages? Is it the pages you want them to be seeing or for some reason are people not reading content that you need them to be?
• Goals and conversions. It’s important to tag functionality on the site so that you can track if people are converting through to your desired action. For example if you have a high conversion rate then you know if you get more traffic it will equal more sales and so you should focus your energy on getting more traffic. However if conversions are low then you need to spend your energy figuring out what’s stopping people signing up/requesting more info/adding to cart and/or making a payment. Only once this is done should you address trying to get more traffic.
• Traffic sources. It’s good to know where your traffic is coming from. Then if you do plan on spending for paid traffic you can direct your budget accordingly. Similarly if you’re hoping that content will drive traffic for you then you know where to put the content. 

HOW CAN VISITORS GET TO YOUR SITE?

Talking of traffic sources…

• Social media platforms. Which channels are you active on. Do your bios on there accurately reflect your offering and positioning and do they link through to your site. Are you using the content on those platforms to generate visits to the site?
• Website optimised for search. As with site speed this is something a web developer can look into for you. It’s about the structure of the site and the way it is set-up to allow Google to read it properly and pull information from it easily.
• Content optimised for search.  Improving your website’s rankings in search engines is a crucial part of your marketing, and a specialist is definitely worth their weight in gold. However a good place to start is ensuring you have keyword rich content on your site. Review your existing content and add keywords people are likely to search on wherever possible (while still sounding like a human speaking). Google does not like duplicate content and it wants to see that when someone visits the site that they stay there for a while and move onto other pages (otherwise known as a low bounce rate). 
• Keyword rich (and marketing focused) meta data. In your content management system you will see that every page has metadata fields. When you fill this in (or tweak it) it’s essentially summarising what that page is about in one sentence. The keyword rich part comes in by thinking about how people would search for what you are selling? What words/phrases/questions would they type into Google. And remember, it’s not just about Google. The copy in your meta data is what the potential customer will see on Google’s search page. Are you enticing them to click? 
• A blog or other regularly updated content. Here at Tiny Hunter we love the thought ‘It’s not about out-spending or out-shouting. It’s all about out-contributing’. Create content that contributes to your customer’s lives. Think about the questions your audience may have in relation to your product and service. Write the answers as blog articles on your site.

DOES YOUR SITE CONNECT WITH YOUR MOST DESIRED CUSTOMER?

• Brand. It is imperative that if your customer has seen your product on a shelf or read some collateral that has caught their interest that it does not feel like a disconnect when they come to your site. The brand experience; tone, look and feel etc should be consistent across all touchpoints. 
• Uncomplicated and user focused language. Ask someone outside of your business to review your site. Do they understand your content? Is it clear what you are offering?
• Web friendly content. Ask someone outside of your business to review your site. Did they get bored? Honestly. We’re serious. Web content needs to be succinct and easily digestible. 
• Ease of carrying out key tasks. Ask someone outside of your business to review your site. Do they understand what you want them to do? Are there clear call to actions throughout the site? When they try to sign up to an email/add something to cart/buy something/book an appointment is it easy or was it clunky? Were they able to do it quickly without asking you any questions?

HOW CAN YOU MAXIMISE RETURN ON INVESTMENT?

You’ve gone to all the effort to get someone to your site. Are you making the most of it? Not everyone is ready to buy and it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t nurture them throughout their journey. 

• Data capture. Are there ‘low commitment’ options to get someone’s contact details once they are on your site? Perhaps there is a useful ebook you could offer, or a checklist or whitepaper relevant to someone in the early / exploration phase. If they do sign up to receive it are you sending them a welcome email? You can encourage them to take a next action (even if it’s simply to follow you on social) and give them additional information about who you are, and more importantly why they should care.
• Invite the return. If you are selling online do you have an abandoned cart email? This is an automated email that increases revenue significantly from users who started the checkout flow but didn’t complete it. Often this is due to final costs such as shipping or taxes, and providing a voucher will bring them back to finish what they started. Another option is retargeting, where you target digital advertising specifically to people who have visited your site previously to bring them back again. If you are paying to get people to your site in the first place, these are low cost ways to get the maximum bang for your buck.

We hope this has helped. If you don’t have the time or resources to do this right now, please feel free to get in contact and we can run a website health check for you.

Written by: Jo Whelan
Published: April 3, 2020