Most small businesses have a website at this point. If you don’t, you should get one. But since you already have one (we’ll just assume you do), it’s time to analyze what it’s doing for your business. Is your website working with you or against you?

Working For You Without Making You Work Hard

Your website should be conveying your expertise and your selling points without putting you through too much work. You don’t want to have to struggle when working with your website, or you will become discouraged and maybe not use it to its full potential.

Your website should be easy for you to manage. What do I mean by that? You should be able to update key parts of your website without having to go through too much work. “Too much work” could mean anything really. But for the sake of the point I’m trying to make here, you should be able to publish new content to your site and update your pages without having to spend a lot of time manually editing files and processing images.

Your website should have a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to do this. Most websites these days do. But if your website doesn’t have a CMS, you should investigate this option as it will allow you to keep your website updated easily, and your website visitors will be much more impressed when they see fresh, useful content on your pages.

Websites can be configured to automatically do certain things as well. Maybe you want to schedule blog posts six months in advance so you can set it and forget it. Maybe you want to be able to create a post on your Facebook Fan Page automatically for every blog post you publish. Maybe you want to be able to send photos to your website and create galleries of events right from your smartphone. All of these are possible, and they are good examples of setting up your website to work in a smarter manner.

Bringing Your Business To Multiple Devices and More People

To put it simply, your website should be able to display itself on as many different Internet browsing devices as possible. People may try to find you or the services you offer while under many different circumstances.

Somebody using their smartphone to find a local service will be more likely to learn about you and contact you if your website works on those types of devices. If your site doesn’t support mobile devices, your business will have a harder time putting itself in front of consumer eyes.

Your business might even exist in a market where your competitors don’t have mobile-compatible websites. I see this a lot in local markets and niches. In this situation, if your website steps up to the plate and works on all mobile browsers, in addition to desktop browsers, you’ll be able to stand out among your competition pretty easily online.

In order for your website to be this compatible, you can either make multiple versions of your website (one for desktop devices and one for mobile) or develop a website that uses Responsive Web Design (RWD). Responsive Web Design is a technique used to make a single website that will “play nice” with all sizes of Web browsers. The route you take will depend on your specific needs.

Creating Leads and Conversions For Your Business

The reason you want to create traffic, and the reason that you want your website to be out there and working for all your visitors, is to convert them into leads or buyers. Are you getting leads from your website? Are people purchasing products or services from your website? They should be. If not, it’s okay, because you can still make adjustments to help your website visitors accomplish what you want them to. That’s the great thing about websites, you can tweak and tweak until you get it right.

Your website should have very clear paths for your customers to follow. And most websites don’t need to have more than one or two good conversion goals. Keep it simple and clear. For example, if you want potential clients to contact you for a consultation, make it clear on your website how you would like them to do that.

When the lead is generated, your website should be able to send leads to you in the manner that your prefer. Do you want people to fill out a form to be prequalified before you call them back? Then set up your website so that it does just that. Do you want any and all possible leads to call you so that you can talk to them? Then set up your website to do just that. It’s important to think of the type of lead that you want to generate. Your website should be generating leads and sending them to you in a way that works for you.

If your website doesn’t do these three things for your business, we can help. We have set up many useful, content managed websites. We also offer a product called EasyCMS which is a great fit for small businesses who need a content managed, mobile compatible website without going through the process of developing a custom site.

For more information contact our EasyCMS Product Specialist, Kristen Oldyn, at EasyCMS@absolutemg.com