Do you send prospects to your website excited knowing they will find exactly what they need to know about you and how you can serve them? Does your website closely, or better yet, exactly represent your brand and clearly communicate how you could slide into their life and make things better?

If you are unsure or know something is missing, but not exactly sure what, use these 5 tips to take a website from good to great. If you are creating a new website, think of it as a complete story you are telling. Not your story, but an invitation for your prospects to imagine how things could be.

1| Have a written brand story and identity pre-determined, bonus points if you had the assistance of professionals in developing it. 

You can slice this dozens of different ways but here are a few things to consider doing.

CREATE A MARKETING STATEMENT Use this formula from Seth Godin, and start to craft your story. Does it capture the essence of what you are about? 

MY COMPANY IS FOR PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE….
WE WILL FOCUS ON PEOPLE WHO…
WE PROMISE THAT…. 

Does your visual brand reflect each of these statements? What images, graphics, colours and copy would bring those elements together? Without you there to explain it does the story and visual elements on your website reflect who you are?

2| Know your customers biggest pain points. 

Do you know the top 3 biggest pains/challenges your customer is facing right before they call you? You designed your business to meet those needs to clearly outlining those is important.

If you aren’t sure here is how you can figure that out:

• What are the same questions are you are asked over and over again? 
• Where are people the most confused or frustrated with before they see you? 
• What do customers thank you for the most? 
• Surveying and testimonials: ask them what they were the most fearful of going into this process. How did you solve that problem for them?

These pains could be grouped in to 4 different categories:

• Financial Pain Points: Your prospects are spending too much money on their current solution or products and want to reduce their spend
• Productivity Pain Points: Your prospects are wasting too much time using their current solution or products and want to use their time more efficiently
• Process Pain Points: Your prospects want to improve internal processes, such as assigning leads to sales reps or nurturing lower-priority leads
• Support Pain Points: Your prospects aren’t receiving the support they need at critical stages of the sales process

3| Website design should reflect your brand 

Your website design experience should be customized to your business: including images, graphics and look/feel. 

• Don’t cut corners by just getting something fast that looks like an easy solution or template to use but doesn’t fit who you are? 
• Is it good enough for what you sell, make or do?
• Are you proud of it? Will it last? Will it be maintained?

4| Clear call to action on each page

This sounds obvious, but we see the instinct is often to be ambiguous or non specific because they don’t want to come across as pushy. It’s not pushy if you are clear and honest. You have something they need, tell them how to get to the next step with you. 

Simple directions such as: Step 1 – 2 – 3. Book an appointment, Start a project, Schedule a call, Free consultation, Free trail, Download now are all good next steps. 

5| Website has to work… every time

What do we mean by work every time includes items such as a complete functioning website that doesn’t have errors on the front or back end, contains clean code, optimized images, complete meta tag descriptions, works on every device size, the right images and quick links driving people to the right places. Super fast loading times and no 404 pages. 

Each of these tips will create a strong website experience for your customers and continue to align and elevate it with your goals for your business. 

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RAISING A BUSINESS PODCAST | We did a full 45 minute podcast on this topic where we dig into each of these items more.
Listen on your favourite podcast player or click here to listen to the episode.