Dated Website? Consider a Facelift

As websites have moved toward responsive design, many of my clients are confronting the harsh realities of creating new websites. In many cases, these sites have content that is no longer representative of their businesses. Their images are irrelevant, often small thumbnails, the navigation clumsy. But starting from scratch and building a new website is always a major initiative; it can be expensive and time-consuming.

Happily, there may be a relatively simple solution

If your site was built in WordPress, in many cases we can simply apply a new design template to the existing site that can achieve a complete transformation. I just finished a project that included this kind of facelift, giving a website a new lease on life and dramatically extending its shelf life.

The client is a husband-and-wife team of smart, savvy business brokers with 50+ years of collective industry experience and a high customer-service ethic. They had a canned website—the vendor provides content and infrastructure, but gives them a lot of latitude for customization. The content feed is very good, but my clients have never taken advantage of it (the last post was in 2013) or done much customization.

Their old site was becoming a liability

My clients are not marketing people, and they launched their site without really giving much thought to SEO, their marketing presence or how the site would look to a prospective client. They were relieved to get the site launched and be able to put their business broker hats back on. 

But now they recognized that their site was becoming a liability; they were missing opportunities to generate new leads, and they asked me to help them update it. This was a simple project, and happily, some easy changes have made a dramatic difference. It showcases my clients as industry experts, has good navigation and increased SEO value.

We made changes that help showcase their industry expertise

• Identified lively new images that are representative of their potential clients and updated the homepage slider, adding visual appeal and energy to their site.
• Rewrote their bios to showcase their wide range of experience, using their keywords throughout.
• Developed case studies that showcase my clients’ high level of customer service and expertise negotiating leases, dealing with government agencies, performing market analyses and business valuations.
• Updated testimonial page so endorsements are fully fleshed out and attractively displayed on the page.
• Turned name of company into a logo/tagline with use of a more stylish font, creating a more distinctive marketing presence.
• Fleshed out Yoast plugin on backend to increase SEO value.
• Added calls to action on all of their personal pages, making it easy for a user to contact them for more information.

None of these efforts by itself was complex, difficult or time-consuming, but collectively, they helped update a website that was uncompetitive. If your sit is not generating leads, rather than a whole new site, this kind of makeover might be a solution for you. 

Contact us at Top of Mind Marketing. We’re SEO and content marketing experts.

Want Better Response Rates? Write Better Calls to Action!

I’m religious about adding a call to action (CTA) to blog and social media posts. But time for a confession: I’m clearly not doing all that well because I’m not getting much response to my CTAs!

A CTA provides your reader with an actionable task

it generally appears as a button, an in-text link, or an image, and it’s usually at the end of an article or blog—but it doesn’t have to be. Play around with this a bit and try adding this after the first paragraph. I always try to frontload the most important information for lazy readers. Adding a CTA right after that first paragraph makes a lot of sense—don’t expect your reader to read the entire article, no matter how great a writer you are. A CTA provides direction; it should answer the question: “Now what?”

A CTA should help drive business–more clicks, sales and engagement

CTAs are especially useful in the online space because they’re trackable, and switching up a few words or the placement of your CTA can dramatically affect analytics. Get this: When SAP switched their CTA color to orange, it boosted their conversion rate by more than 32.5 percent. But even if you’re not specifically asking your audience to act on something, you do want to be taking action and asking them to engage with your brand further.

Asking your followers to share or reply is an excellent way to find out just how many people are listening and are interested in what you have to say. 

Here are some CTA best practices that will help generate better response to your posts. 

1. Use action verbs. Discover, find, or explore; it will help draw visitors in and nudge them towards the action you want them to take.
2. Value proposition. What’s in it for me? You need to make it clear how your audience will benefit.
3. Consistency. Keep the tone consistent with the rest of your content and your brand.At the end of a great article, you don’t want to jar your audience with a trashy CTA.
4. Clarity is key. Avoid jargon and be wary of trying to be funny—this can backfire.
5. Transition. Lead into your CTA with supplementary copy so there’s some context, a smooth transition.
6. FOMO. Americans suffer from an acute case of FOMO—the fear of missing out–and it can be incredibly powerful. Include expiration dates, offer ending dates. Call right now is better than Call anytime.
7. Make it mindless. Which is easier: Call today or Fill out this form?
8. Align with landing page. Align your CTA with landing page content. If you’re sending your reader to a landing page to sign up for something, let them know where they’re going and what the expectation is. Set the expectation to build trust.
9. Make contacting you easy. Make sure your contact info is clearly visible in multiple places. Transparency and open communication are huge selling points that are often overlooked by brands.
10. Personalize whenever possible. Grow your profits today vs Grow profits today.

In conclusion 

Take a look at your website. Is it easy to find your contact information or does it take a little gumshoe work to find your phone number and intake form? Most people these days are attuned to looking for the Contact tab on your website—it’s generally the last item on the right if your navigation schematic is on the top of the page, the bottom item if it’s on the left.

But you can do more

You can make the intake form visible on all pages so it’s really easy for people to contact you. I just redid my own website, and I added a Schedule a free consultation button to all pages, but looking at it now, I realize I should move this up to the header area. Now the big test: how does this look on mobile devices? Make sure that you don’t lose your accessibility for mobile users.

Contact Top of Mind Marketing today for a free consultation about your website or content marketing program. We’re writers and content marketing experts.