We Hope You Didn’t Forget Your Website This Christmas

So, your Mum, Dad, dog, Secret Santa and Grandma all loved their gifts, but what about your web presence?

Don’t leave one of your business’s most important sales and marketing tools out in the cold. Stuck for ideas on what to gift your site with this Christmas, or to embark upon in the new year? The HushBots have put together the below suggestions that would really make your web presence feel like it is all dressed up in that perfect, glitzy New Year’s dress!

Responsive Design

Believe it or not, even though Google announced back in 2014 that it was going to start penalising websites without responsive design, by ranking them lower on the search engines than competitor website that has been optimised for tablet and mobile devices, some people still haven’t jumped on board. It’s almost 2017, come on guys!

Still not quite up to speed with responsive design? Not a problem. Speak to us about converting your current design or treating your website a full front-end refresh.

User-Friendly Navigation

It’s always handy for your visitors to be able to find where they’re going quickly and easily, after all, if your navigation is cumbersome and complex, a user will simply click off and jump onto your competitor’s website instead. And, if their navigation is more user-friendly than yours, they are far more likely to get the sale or enquiry.

Keep your menus as simple and straightforward as possible, and if you have lots of items that need to be seen as soon as a user lands on the page, simply split these up into a Header Menu and a Main Menu, with less important or generic stuff going into the Footer Menu at the bottom of the page.

Photography

The visual impact of your website depends hugely on the quality of the image content, and this means that photography really can make or break a site. Bad quality imagery can affect your visitors’ first impressions immediately, despite the fact that you might be offering a high-quality product. On the flipside, good imagery can make you instantly stand out from the crowd, enhance the quality of your product and service and engage and invite a visitor to explore much more.

Updating your image content is a quick and easy way of giving your website a quick ‘facelift’ if your website is still fairly modern and isn’t quite ready for a full redesign.

Videography

The use of video on websites has resulted in improved conversion rates up to 80%, so it is absolutely not something that should be ignored. Most websites nowadays should have the capability to easily embed video content into various sections including blogs, product pages and slider areas.

Great ways to incorporate video into your website include showcase video loops seamlessly integrated into large slider areas (whether this is just the homepage, or throughout the whole site), tailored demo videos on product pages or an introductory corporate video within your About Us page to give a much deeper look and feel of how your company works.

Written Content

You may have heard the phrase ‘Content is King’ from many digital marketing experts over the past couple of years and, whilst many other elements of SEO and other aspects of web marketing still have an important part to play, the written content on your website really is the fundamental base to then build the rest of your marketing on.

Get your website’s content reviewed, rewritten and optimised to ensure it is relevant, insightful and current. If you haven’t got a blog already – add one! This can increase your visitor numbers, have a massive impact on inbound links and allow you to keep your sites content fresh on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis with new and engaging content.

SEO

Having a website but giving your SEO friendliness no attention is almost a cardinal sin, where traffic and conversions are concerned. If you have a website but aren’t shouting about it… how are people going to find out about your product or service offering? Establishing yourself a high rank in search engines means that you’re likely to pull in the most traffic, bringing you in the most business. Let our Hushbots work through your technical SEO, website friendliness, content and all of the fiddly meta on your behalf.

Social Media

So here’s the situation: you fall in love with the perfect dress (or suit!) but it will have a considerable impact upon your (now dwindling, because… Christmas!) bank balance – and you’ve never bought from the website before. The first place we all look is the business’ Social Media, where we’re able to see customer reviews and ask our own questions for peace of mind.

Not only this, but Social Media is such an easy way to establish links back to your own website, and give out the information that you want to convey about your company so efficiently, quickly, and cost-effectively.

Newsletters

Newsletters are such an effective marketing tool, for a number of reasons. Once you have a template designed, you can pretty much pop in the information you want to convey, link and check your buttons, select your list, hit send and off it goes!

You can manage your email lists, meaning you can target specific users. For example, someone that hasn’t purchased in 3 months, you can collate an email with a small offer specifically for these people, send to just them, and entice them back into the website – without sending to your whole list of subscribers.

Security

SSL is used to encrypt sensitive information that a website takes from users, which is important because information is passed from computer to computer before it gets to the desired server – you want to protect your user’s data, so you’re protecting them! SSL makes the information unreadable for everyone except the desired server and protects from hackers.

To enhance security, as of January ‘17 Google will flag any website without SSL as ‘site not secure’ as a warning to your visitors, which could deter users.

Live Chat

Live chat is a gift to both you and your user for many reasons. For the user: if they need a quick question answering, it can be asked, answered and sorted, all whilst on their lunch break. It’s also instant for them, receiving a response within seconds – without the hellish ‘on hold’ music!

The big one for businesses is the report of chat transcripts. You will receive reports of the chats you receive, meaning you can collate these and those most frequently asked you can ensure to cover on your landing page, info pages or FAQs – ensuring a better customer experience.

Your sales may increase through the use of live chat, as you can nudge your customers towards a product, or ‘solution’ without doing a big hard sell. You can also collect customer data, so if the time isn’t right for them at the moment, you may be able to get back in touch when your services are necessary.

So, there you have it. Plenty of little tips that will instantly update your web presence! Any of the above sound particularly relevant to you? Give us a call on 01325 361 729 and let’s get together to chat about your requirements!