The Top 10 Small Business Web Design Mistakes
Uploaded by fletchmonster on 17.02.2012
Transcript:
bjbj The Top 10 Small Business Web Design Mistakes and How to Avoid Them [0:00:00] Hey,
guys. This is Aaron Fletcher at Geek-Free Marketing and NinjaWebDesigns.com and in this
short video we re going to cover the top 10 small business web design mistakes and how
to avoid them. re probably aware that Google gets over 600,000 daily searches for local
services and that s likely leaving you wondering, Where the heck are yours? And if you re like
most small business owners, you probably currently have a website but aren t satisfied with those
traffic and leads generated. You might know you need to do something to increase you internet
presence and reach more clients online and you re just trying to get from point A where
you have little traffic and even less leads and create a simple-to-use site that Google
and people love. But it s not that simple, is it? Well today, we re going to make it
a little bit easier and show you the top 10 small business web design mistakes and again
how to avoid them. The first one is hiring a web designer. That might [0:00:58] [Indiscernible]
I m playing with words there but really the art and science of online marketing are very
different when we look at aesthetics versus functionality and when you hire a web designer,
search and usability are often lacking. That just means that you can end up with a nice-looking
hotel in the middle of the desert. By that, I mean most designers that go to design school
and have that type of background are very good at aesthetics and looks and creativity
but not so much in the science of finding the right keywords and doing the right things
to make your sites search engine-friendly and ultimately a valuable tool for lead generation.
The second mistake is not implementing SEO basics and by that, we mean page titles which
is using the most popular keywords on the title of every page on your site, ensuring
that you incorporate those keywords and important places on your site meaning your articles,
blogs, your service pages and everywhere in your site where you want to attract people.
You need to use those keywords. And the last thing is just backlinks. Even though that
s not a design element per se, I would like to sneak that in there because it s so important
to list your business in the right places to get found by your clients. The third mistake
is not using a CMS or content management system and they re very a handful of very effective
ones being WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, are the most popular and they allow you to easily
manage content yourself with little or no technical knowledge. We only use and recommend
WordPress and it s important to have a CMS there folks because lack of ability to access
or log into your site is a reason why most small business owners don t have a successful
site because they re disconnected from the site. The fourth mistake that we see a lot
is just failing to add content. Again, this ties into not having a friendly site or not
seeing that it s important enough or making a priority out of adding content on a regular
basis; and the result of this is that most websites are online brochures, just static,
boring text information about you instead of about the needs of your clients. And we
believe you should blog at lease once a week and you should address the needs of your audience,
not yourself. Contrary to popular belief, outsourcing is better than not publishing
at all because if the result is that you have four new blog posts a month that aren t ideal,
at least if they re high quality, you re adding content that s going to attract search engines
and people to your site which is the whole point. So doing this bears huge traffic and
reputation benefits and it s important to add content frequently. The fifth mistake
we see is omitting local address information and what we mean by that is Google Places
and other directories validate this. They look at your website and they try to match
your online listings with your site itself to see if you re legitimate and you have to
have your physical location and address entered the right way in your site and it should match
those other searches, other sites where people are doing searches rather. A lot of people
don t know this but mobile search use is growing over 400 percent each year. So if you can
imagine how important it is considering that you re a local business to show up when people
are doing local mobile searches, you have to have that local information on your site.
Doing this also builds trust and confidence with clients. They feel more comfortable if
you re seen as a person of authority and you have local information everywhere on your
site. The last thing you need to do is just make sure you list your address on the header
or footer of every page; not just on your Contact Us page but list out local information
on every page. The sixth mistake we see is forgetting a strong call to action. So, this
tells visitors what the next step is and how. So in a lot of sites, you will see a lot of
great information but then a visitor just leaves and they go to another site when they
finally make a purchase or engage a doctor or lawyer or dentist like yourself because
you were not providing a clear path in telling them what to do next. You need to make it
easy for clients to contact you. So by using lead forms in multiple places on every page
and even a traffic magnet like an ebook, a video or tip sheet, you re really making it
easy to contact you. A lot of clients don t feel comfortable using contact forms or
large phone numbers but you have to do that because if you think about your website as
a filter and you re getting probably several thousand for the average small business owner,
12,000, 15,000, 20,000 visitors a year coming to your site and it s all about how many of
those are sticking and actually contacting you and becoming leads. So if you do something
like write an ebook or a quick video or even a tip sheet that they have to enter their
name, phone number or email address to download, you re going to have a lot better results
by using a traffic magnet. Number seven is failing to engage clients. So really what
this boils down to is that text is dead. Online attention span of people is about 15 seconds
and we like to say at AttentionVideo.com that a picture is worth a thousand words but a
video is worth a thousand clients. So you can imagine that a video would probably increase
a time on website. It usually does but more importantly, it allows clients to get to know
you right away. So instead of looking at some boring text that they re going to glance at
and they go to the next provider online, they re going to get to know you and get a feel
for your style and see you as a provider of good services and authority in your area.
You can almost use the internet as a virtual sales force [0:06:32] [Indiscernible] people
instead of just have them come to a boring site and leave. The eighth mistake we see
is not tracking the results. Most business owners say they re just too busy to do this,
which goes back to the e-myth that [Indiscernible] the popular books out there. They will tell
you that you re in the business of marketing and selling products and services, not just
providing them so you must track your search rankings, how many people are coming to your
site, those of your visits and then the leads and clients in order to improve results. And
considering that Google Analytics is free and easy to use, there s really not an excuse
to not do this because you re probably wasting money each and every week or month by not
tracking which of your expenditures are not producing a positive return on investment
and cutting those out and it s important to test various methods and eliminate the lame
ducks out there. That s the best way to get traction to your marketing is to test everything
and throw out the underperformers. OK? The ninth mistake is missing trust and social
icons. So people place great value on reviews and peer validation meaning if you are going
to order a pizza or get LASIK surgery or going on vacation at a lodge in Costa Rica, you
re probably going to use Yelp!, Facebook and other review sites to evaluate your decisions,
so everything from Amazon.com to restaurants to senior care and Caring.com. You re going
to use reviews to place as a form of wading out your potential options. It s really important
to use social icons. They also build trust out there and finally with other elements
like Better Business Bureau or trade association logos. These things all build trust with your
market and show them that you re a trusted authority out there. And the tenth and final
mistake is using vanity domains. So when I say vanity domains, I mean just your name
dot com and the truth is that Google and people value keyword-rich domains. So as I said,
having a website like ClevelandBankruptcy.com would be much more effective than SteveJankinsLaw.com
especially if you want a bankruptcy lawyer. So many names are still available. Use dot
com and dot net only and it s important to do this because you re going to, again, show
people that your website has the content they re looking for. They will get to know your
name later. Branding is for large organizations but if your name is not Coca-Cola, you re
better off going with a keyword-rich domain. OK. The last thing I want to cover is questions
to ask an online marketing firm. This is really important because now we ve established that
you have to have a CMS like WordPress. You have to deal with a firm that can help you
market your site and design it with an eye for conversion and performance. We need to
ask a couple of questions of these firms, prospective firms to see if they re a good
fit for you. The first thing is samples of work in your industry. Ask for references.
If I m a dentist in Chicago, I want to say, Show me other dentist sites you ve done and
how they re ranking on Google. So example of client search results, Dallas Mexican restaurant
. As long as I m not a chiropractor, that should be pretty impressive if a firm can
produce those results and show them and demonstrate them to me. And finally not finally, but again
is the site built on WordPress or some other CMS? It s so important to use a CMS because
the next question is, Can you log in and manage content? and yourself updating and adding
photos or blogs, et cetera. If you think that someone is just going to design you a site
that s going to work magic for you, you re mistaken. You have to have a vested interest
and ownership of your marketing and quite frankly, be passionate about it because you
re not going to invest the time required to master marketing and part of that is whoever
you work with to help design and market your site, Is there training and support provided?
Is it a one-time deliverable or are you going to establish a relationship with these folks?
And if you know how to measure and evaluate return on investment, you should be willing
to do that because a website is a living organism that needs to constantly be tweaked and improved
and nurtured in order to produce the results that you want. Like anything good in life,
it takes work, right? And finally, are there any ongoing hosting or maintenance fees? That
s really something that a lot of especially dealing with a lot of attorneys, I see a lot
of attorneys get burned with really high maintenance fees, $600, $700 or $1000 or more dollars
just for maintenance which there s no active marketing or advertising going on. So really
ask those questions. Take time to read the agreements and one more thing I wanted to
bring up is just that to ask, Do you own the domain and website properties? because a lot
of website companies have a leasing model because they re just trying to get more residual
money out of companies. So they will not only charge you to customize or design a site but
they actually own the IP that s associated in the creative assets and actually own your
website. So you want to ask those questions. Hopefully, you found this was helpful and
I provided some good information to steer you on the right track on your marketing and
hopefully you feel a little bit of relief knowing that if you avoid these top 10 mistakes,
you will probably be better off when it comes to designing and maintaining your website.
But if you need more info, we can direct you to a couple of resources that basically what
we do at Geek-Free Marketing and Ninja Web Designs is we make websites that are friendly
for you, obviously for your customers and for search engines. OK? So search engines,
you and your customers all love our sites because we always think about the three legs
of the table, three legs that it takes to hold up the table and that is the foundation
of a strong marketing platform. So you have to think about all three entities in everything
that you do. If your website isn t friendly for you, you re not going to invest time and
use it. Obviously if it s not friendly for your clients, they re going to come there
and bounce which means they leave without contacting you, if they ever find you at all;
and in order for that to happen, you need to be friendly for search engines. So remember,
those are the three legs of the online marketing table that you need to have when it comes
to web design. Feel free to contact us now if you want to learn more about our services.
Thank you very much and I appreciate your time and if you want to get pointed in the
right direction, Geek-Free Marketing, Attention Video and Ninja Web Designs are our brands.
Geek-Free Marketing provides online marketing, coaching and consulting for small business
owners. Attention Video provides killer online videos that engage your audience so we can
put those on your website and everywhere else in the web people are looking and help you
actually rank those videos in search results. And finally, NinjaWebDesigns.com makes WordPress
websites that rock. Thank you and have a good day. [0:13:30] PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT hZt\ hZnx
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Word Owner Title Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document NB6W Word.Document.8
guys. This is Aaron Fletcher at Geek-Free Marketing and NinjaWebDesigns.com and in this
short video we re going to cover the top 10 small business web design mistakes and how
to avoid them. re probably aware that Google gets over 600,000 daily searches for local
services and that s likely leaving you wondering, Where the heck are yours? And if you re like
most small business owners, you probably currently have a website but aren t satisfied with those
traffic and leads generated. You might know you need to do something to increase you internet
presence and reach more clients online and you re just trying to get from point A where
you have little traffic and even less leads and create a simple-to-use site that Google
and people love. But it s not that simple, is it? Well today, we re going to make it
a little bit easier and show you the top 10 small business web design mistakes and again
how to avoid them. The first one is hiring a web designer. That might [0:00:58] [Indiscernible]
I m playing with words there but really the art and science of online marketing are very
different when we look at aesthetics versus functionality and when you hire a web designer,
search and usability are often lacking. That just means that you can end up with a nice-looking
hotel in the middle of the desert. By that, I mean most designers that go to design school
and have that type of background are very good at aesthetics and looks and creativity
but not so much in the science of finding the right keywords and doing the right things
to make your sites search engine-friendly and ultimately a valuable tool for lead generation.
The second mistake is not implementing SEO basics and by that, we mean page titles which
is using the most popular keywords on the title of every page on your site, ensuring
that you incorporate those keywords and important places on your site meaning your articles,
blogs, your service pages and everywhere in your site where you want to attract people.
You need to use those keywords. And the last thing is just backlinks. Even though that
s not a design element per se, I would like to sneak that in there because it s so important
to list your business in the right places to get found by your clients. The third mistake
is not using a CMS or content management system and they re very a handful of very effective
ones being WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, are the most popular and they allow you to easily
manage content yourself with little or no technical knowledge. We only use and recommend
WordPress and it s important to have a CMS there folks because lack of ability to access
or log into your site is a reason why most small business owners don t have a successful
site because they re disconnected from the site. The fourth mistake that we see a lot
is just failing to add content. Again, this ties into not having a friendly site or not
seeing that it s important enough or making a priority out of adding content on a regular
basis; and the result of this is that most websites are online brochures, just static,
boring text information about you instead of about the needs of your clients. And we
believe you should blog at lease once a week and you should address the needs of your audience,
not yourself. Contrary to popular belief, outsourcing is better than not publishing
at all because if the result is that you have four new blog posts a month that aren t ideal,
at least if they re high quality, you re adding content that s going to attract search engines
and people to your site which is the whole point. So doing this bears huge traffic and
reputation benefits and it s important to add content frequently. The fifth mistake
we see is omitting local address information and what we mean by that is Google Places
and other directories validate this. They look at your website and they try to match
your online listings with your site itself to see if you re legitimate and you have to
have your physical location and address entered the right way in your site and it should match
those other searches, other sites where people are doing searches rather. A lot of people
don t know this but mobile search use is growing over 400 percent each year. So if you can
imagine how important it is considering that you re a local business to show up when people
are doing local mobile searches, you have to have that local information on your site.
Doing this also builds trust and confidence with clients. They feel more comfortable if
you re seen as a person of authority and you have local information everywhere on your
site. The last thing you need to do is just make sure you list your address on the header
or footer of every page; not just on your Contact Us page but list out local information
on every page. The sixth mistake we see is forgetting a strong call to action. So, this
tells visitors what the next step is and how. So in a lot of sites, you will see a lot of
great information but then a visitor just leaves and they go to another site when they
finally make a purchase or engage a doctor or lawyer or dentist like yourself because
you were not providing a clear path in telling them what to do next. You need to make it
easy for clients to contact you. So by using lead forms in multiple places on every page
and even a traffic magnet like an ebook, a video or tip sheet, you re really making it
easy to contact you. A lot of clients don t feel comfortable using contact forms or
large phone numbers but you have to do that because if you think about your website as
a filter and you re getting probably several thousand for the average small business owner,
12,000, 15,000, 20,000 visitors a year coming to your site and it s all about how many of
those are sticking and actually contacting you and becoming leads. So if you do something
like write an ebook or a quick video or even a tip sheet that they have to enter their
name, phone number or email address to download, you re going to have a lot better results
by using a traffic magnet. Number seven is failing to engage clients. So really what
this boils down to is that text is dead. Online attention span of people is about 15 seconds
and we like to say at AttentionVideo.com that a picture is worth a thousand words but a
video is worth a thousand clients. So you can imagine that a video would probably increase
a time on website. It usually does but more importantly, it allows clients to get to know
you right away. So instead of looking at some boring text that they re going to glance at
and they go to the next provider online, they re going to get to know you and get a feel
for your style and see you as a provider of good services and authority in your area.
You can almost use the internet as a virtual sales force [0:06:32] [Indiscernible] people
instead of just have them come to a boring site and leave. The eighth mistake we see
is not tracking the results. Most business owners say they re just too busy to do this,
which goes back to the e-myth that [Indiscernible] the popular books out there. They will tell
you that you re in the business of marketing and selling products and services, not just
providing them so you must track your search rankings, how many people are coming to your
site, those of your visits and then the leads and clients in order to improve results. And
considering that Google Analytics is free and easy to use, there s really not an excuse
to not do this because you re probably wasting money each and every week or month by not
tracking which of your expenditures are not producing a positive return on investment
and cutting those out and it s important to test various methods and eliminate the lame
ducks out there. That s the best way to get traction to your marketing is to test everything
and throw out the underperformers. OK? The ninth mistake is missing trust and social
icons. So people place great value on reviews and peer validation meaning if you are going
to order a pizza or get LASIK surgery or going on vacation at a lodge in Costa Rica, you
re probably going to use Yelp!, Facebook and other review sites to evaluate your decisions,
so everything from Amazon.com to restaurants to senior care and Caring.com. You re going
to use reviews to place as a form of wading out your potential options. It s really important
to use social icons. They also build trust out there and finally with other elements
like Better Business Bureau or trade association logos. These things all build trust with your
market and show them that you re a trusted authority out there. And the tenth and final
mistake is using vanity domains. So when I say vanity domains, I mean just your name
dot com and the truth is that Google and people value keyword-rich domains. So as I said,
having a website like ClevelandBankruptcy.com would be much more effective than SteveJankinsLaw.com
especially if you want a bankruptcy lawyer. So many names are still available. Use dot
com and dot net only and it s important to do this because you re going to, again, show
people that your website has the content they re looking for. They will get to know your
name later. Branding is for large organizations but if your name is not Coca-Cola, you re
better off going with a keyword-rich domain. OK. The last thing I want to cover is questions
to ask an online marketing firm. This is really important because now we ve established that
you have to have a CMS like WordPress. You have to deal with a firm that can help you
market your site and design it with an eye for conversion and performance. We need to
ask a couple of questions of these firms, prospective firms to see if they re a good
fit for you. The first thing is samples of work in your industry. Ask for references.
If I m a dentist in Chicago, I want to say, Show me other dentist sites you ve done and
how they re ranking on Google. So example of client search results, Dallas Mexican restaurant
. As long as I m not a chiropractor, that should be pretty impressive if a firm can
produce those results and show them and demonstrate them to me. And finally not finally, but again
is the site built on WordPress or some other CMS? It s so important to use a CMS because
the next question is, Can you log in and manage content? and yourself updating and adding
photos or blogs, et cetera. If you think that someone is just going to design you a site
that s going to work magic for you, you re mistaken. You have to have a vested interest
and ownership of your marketing and quite frankly, be passionate about it because you
re not going to invest the time required to master marketing and part of that is whoever
you work with to help design and market your site, Is there training and support provided?
Is it a one-time deliverable or are you going to establish a relationship with these folks?
And if you know how to measure and evaluate return on investment, you should be willing
to do that because a website is a living organism that needs to constantly be tweaked and improved
and nurtured in order to produce the results that you want. Like anything good in life,
it takes work, right? And finally, are there any ongoing hosting or maintenance fees? That
s really something that a lot of especially dealing with a lot of attorneys, I see a lot
of attorneys get burned with really high maintenance fees, $600, $700 or $1000 or more dollars
just for maintenance which there s no active marketing or advertising going on. So really
ask those questions. Take time to read the agreements and one more thing I wanted to
bring up is just that to ask, Do you own the domain and website properties? because a lot
of website companies have a leasing model because they re just trying to get more residual
money out of companies. So they will not only charge you to customize or design a site but
they actually own the IP that s associated in the creative assets and actually own your
website. So you want to ask those questions. Hopefully, you found this was helpful and
I provided some good information to steer you on the right track on your marketing and
hopefully you feel a little bit of relief knowing that if you avoid these top 10 mistakes,
you will probably be better off when it comes to designing and maintaining your website.
But if you need more info, we can direct you to a couple of resources that basically what
we do at Geek-Free Marketing and Ninja Web Designs is we make websites that are friendly
for you, obviously for your customers and for search engines. OK? So search engines,
you and your customers all love our sites because we always think about the three legs
of the table, three legs that it takes to hold up the table and that is the foundation
of a strong marketing platform. So you have to think about all three entities in everything
that you do. If your website isn t friendly for you, you re not going to invest time and
use it. Obviously if it s not friendly for your clients, they re going to come there
and bounce which means they leave without contacting you, if they ever find you at all;
and in order for that to happen, you need to be friendly for search engines. So remember,
those are the three legs of the online marketing table that you need to have when it comes
to web design. Feel free to contact us now if you want to learn more about our services.
Thank you very much and I appreciate your time and if you want to get pointed in the
right direction, Geek-Free Marketing, Attention Video and Ninja Web Designs are our brands.
Geek-Free Marketing provides online marketing, coaching and consulting for small business
owners. Attention Video provides killer online videos that engage your audience so we can
put those on your website and everywhere else in the web people are looking and help you
actually rank those videos in search results. And finally, NinjaWebDesigns.com makes WordPress
websites that rock. Thank you and have a good day. [0:13:30] PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT hZt\ hZnx
[Content_Types].xml #!MB ;c=1 _rels/.rels theme/theme/themeManager.xml sQ}# theme/theme/theme1.xml
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folHlink="folHlink"/> aron PREXY Normal.dotm Aaron Fletcher Microsoft Macintosh
Word Owner Title Microsoft Word 97-2004 Document NB6W Word.Document.8