The success and proper operation of a company’s website can be a finicky thing. Sometimes it’s working for some unexplainable reason, and sometimes it’s not working for some unexplainable reason.
Now, what does it mean when a website is working?
It simply means that the desired end result is being obtained. For some businesses, that means customers add items to a cart, and then they successfully check out.
For other businesses, it means that a potential client fills out a form – and you’re able to follow up with that individual to do business with them.
When a website isn’t working – then it can always be a multitude of things. Let’s consider a service based business that requires potential clients to fill out a form.
Let’s say that, based on your analytics, you can see that you’re getting a lot of traffic to your site, but once they get there, they leave quickly.
I recently had this happen with a construction company client, so I did a deep dive into what could have been happening.
Luckily for us, it was pretty obvious – I just had to put myself in the mind of someone looking for their services.
A while back, this contractor had been pushing to strictly do custom home builds – however, we weren’t quite there yet and our marketing was reflecting remodels, renovations and additions.
So upon investigation, I found that right there on the home page it said Custom Home Builders in Niagara. Aha! A potential client looking for a remodel or reno would click on the site, come to the home page and think “I don’t want a custom home, I want a reno,” and then they would leave.
We changed the wording to Proudly Serving the Niagara Region, and it seems to have solved our problem.
So this brings me to the purpose of this subject – if your website is working, just don’t touch it.
With this client, they’re constantly doing a lot of new projects – and they’re excited to show them off and use them as marketing material.
However, you should only add things to your website and make date dependent changes if your site is working well.
For this client, their site is working well at the moment – they’re having a massive influx of forms being filled out, and this is something we want to continue to happen.
If we were to go in and start changing the flow of the site by adding different videos or replacing photos, or even changing the order and appearance of things, we might experience a sudden drop-off in forms being filled out.
Now, this can be due to Google’s indexing system, or it can even be due to basic human psychology. All we can do as marketers is look at the data we have access to and make estimates on the correct moves to make.
Everything in marketing is a slow and tedious process. (1) Get an idea, (2) take action, (3) collect data, (4) re-establish a new direction, (5) repeat.
If a client wants to have updates done to their site, and new things need to be added – I always lean more towards a blog page as well as a gallery page.
So for this particular client, in summary, we will be keeping their site the same as it is at the moment, because it’s working for them. We do have a blog page, so we’re adding blogs every 2 weeks. This helps with SEO.
Their site also has a gallery page, so we add before, during and after photos and videos once per quarter on all projects that have been completed.
We make date dependent changes as well for these guys – but other than that, the site remains the same, and it shall until it stops working for them.
Remember this if you’re getting excited about creating new content and thinking that you need to constantly revamp your website in tandem with this growth.
I’ll use a quote my father and my uncles used to use on me: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
To Your Success,
Jay Ashcroft
four32 MEDIA
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