Over the past month we’ve had the opportunity to travel, speak and teach at conferences, share about our new customizable Showit5 website themes in The Palm Shop, and eat at In-and-Out Burger. It’s been a good month.
We had the opportunity to meet with a few creatives who wanted us to review their websites while we were at the Showit United Conference. Since we were not able to meet with everyone, we came up with 5 questions for a 5-minute DIY website review anyone can complete.
Get our full DIY Website Review Guide and make sure your site is ready for booking season!
5 Optimization Questions for Your DIY Website Review
1. Is your website mobile friendly?
This is the first question because it’s that important.
Imagine Google is a very large book of websites, and it places each page of your website within this book. It’s indexing those pages. Right now Google uses the desktop versions of sites to determine how to deliver results. Sometime in the not-so-far-off-future, Google will begin to rank primarily based on signals from your mobile site. Thus it is more important than ever to make sure your website is mobile friendly.
You can check if a page on your website is mobile friendly by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.
2. What’s in the hero-spot on your website?
The “hero-spot” on a website is the area above-the-fold that generally contains a graphic and text. It’s what people immediately see when landing on your website. What does it say? It should contain the most important information.
The image in the hero-spot should be relevant, and the text should summarize the benefit of your product/service and contain a call-to-action. If that’s all people see, would they have an idea of what you’re offering, the primary benefit, and what to do next?
If not, think through what action you want new visitors to take as soon as they land on your website. Should they learn more about your company, or maybe be pointed in the direction of a resource you offer?
3. Are you selling the hole or the drill?
A Harvard Business School professor once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole.” What are you selling? The hole or the drill?
Most people mistakenly focus on ‘features’ or ‘deliverables’ instead of focusing on ‘benefits’ or how the product/service is going to transform one’s life. Do people care more about getting 1,341 wedding pictures or do they care more about getting wedding pictures that capture their personalities, love, and the story of the day that they can cherish with their grandchildren? Probably the latter.
4. What’s next? Are visitors guided through your website?
So someone clicks on your website from social media or Google. What’s next? Does the blog post end without suggesting other content or pages? Are people brought to pages or posts where it’s not easy to navigate to other parts of the website?
It’s important for your site to make sense organizationally, which means visitors should never feel ‘lost’. And one of the most important questions you can ask of your content is ‘what’s next?’ Ultimately you want visitors to consume other information, contact you, or purchase a product or service. How does the content on your site contribute to that goal?
5. Does your website meet its visitors where they’re at?
There are a few levels to this question, and it requires a bit of testing to figure out. But basically, how does your website convey information? Does your website fulfill the deeper desire of your visitors as they browse your site? And does it answer the questions, concerns, and objections that arise as they look around?
The mistake we often see is people try to convey ALL the information instead of the right information. Visitors are often overwhelmed with too much copy or too many galleries. Only share your best work, and remember to think through what a visitors desires, questions, and objections might be. When it comes to copy, less is generally more.
All of our custom and Palm Shop websites are created with these questions in mind. Websites should educate visitors and encourage them to take action. Good websites are beautiful. But a great website goes beyond beautiful and creates an experience for visitors.
VIEW THE COMMENTS
Add A Comment