By Evan Vitale
Believe it or not, your company’s website makes a first – and lasting – impression when it comes to earning new customers and clients. Almost every potential customer views a company’s website before they make a purchase!
Therefore, if business is a little slow during the holidays, now is a great time to update and “re-fresh” your company website.
Fortunately, this is not an expensive task, nor do you need to start completely from scratch and build your website from the ground up.
Instead, follow these basic tips on how to add some new life to your stale company website:
- Make sure your basic information (i.e., contact details; address, telephone number, FAX number and hours of operation are accurate).
- If you have a “Contact Us” form, test and make sure the form is properly working and details are being forwarded to the right personnel in your office. Recently, a client of mine found many forms were being completed by potential customers, only to be forwarded to the manager’s SPAM folder!
- Update your staff/team page. Every employee should be listed here with a picture (yes, a picture!) and a complete bio and contact details. Customers like to see pictures of people they are doing business with, talking to over the telephone, etc. They show you are a real “people” business.
- Update your products and services page with fresh details on what your company has to offer. Remove discontinued items or services you no longer offer and add new products and services to this page. Re-write stale, old content.
- Your website should include a blog. In case you didn’t know, a blog is like a “diary” of sorts and should include regular blog posts (think “mini” articles) about your business, how to solve a problem, industry news, etc. Search engines – and customers – love fresh content, so try to write and publish two or three blog posts per week (more on this in an upcoming blog post here!).
- Consider creating a “Media” or “Articles” page, which would include press releases; articles about your company or local press coverage.
- On your website’s “Home” page, be sure to include links or buttons to your company’s Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn pages (and to any other social networking pages including Pinterest, etc.).
Your company website isn’t a brochure that sits in the lobby collecting dust. Brochures never get updated, but your website should constantly be re-freshed with new content, blog posts, photographs and more about your business and the products and services it offers.
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Evan Vitale also writes and publishes a blog on http://evanvitale.org.