Many years ago, I was speaking at an event with Aaron Kahlow, a social media marketing expert. In his presentation, Aaron spoke about the investment in and return of a website. Specifically, he discussed the analogy of companies designing and furnishing their corporate lobby.
Corporate lobbies often have someone there to greet people, they have beautiful furniture and even artwork and refreshments to impress the visitors. Companies often spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on their lobbies – yet they’re often empty.
Your website is your corporate lobby and requires the same level of attention, but our industry has sadly devalued itself by offering free and cheap sites. Companies that make the investment in an incredible website realize the return on investment almost immediately. Meanwhile, companies that don’t invest in their site don’t see a return on investment. Sadly, this continues to impact their understanding of digital marketing. Most of our leads don’t come from our website, these company executives state. I’m curious if those same companies think about how many leads came from their investment in an impressive lobby.
A website is not simply a brochure for your company. Your website is a reflection of your best marketing, builds authority and credibility for your business, and works 24 hours a day and seven days a week as a salesperson for your company. With that in mind, it’s imperative that you work to ensure your website is fresh, designed for your visitors, cleaned up continually, protected, and properly manned, just as your lobby is.
I don’t want to upset the apple cart here with my other agency friends, but branding and design are only a small part of your overall website strategy. To fully realize the return on investment your company is making a website, you must also:
- Register and monitor the site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmasters. Review your site’s health to identify and correct issues to ensure your domain builds authority and gains exposure in relevant organic search results.
- Implement citations consistently like name, address, and phone number to distinguish your site and ensure it’s visible in local search results. Also register and monitor your business with social media sites, directories, ratings, and review sites that will drive traffic to your site locally and assist in managing your reputation. Don’t fall for every directory, though. Registering for every directory can do more harm than good, as many have become havens for black hat marketing.
- Optimize your content management system for search engines, ensuring tactical issues like robots.txt and XML sitemaps are published, Open Graph and other rich snippets are integrated, permalink structures are optimized, canonical tags are implemented, title tags are properly written, and meta descriptions are compelling.
- Speed up your site to improve engagement and rankings, ensuring your images are compressed properly, content delivery networks are implemented, and assets are minified, aggregated, and cached to maximize page speed.
- Mobile responsiveness is critical with more than half of users now browsing the web from a mobile device. Because of this, it’s imperative that many companies take a mobile-first approach to the design and optimization of their site.
- Create authority by thinking of your site as a content library for your prospects and clients. What content should you publish to help them research their jobs, their industry, and your products and services online? Provide value and a comprehensive selection of premier content pieces instead of producing endless reams of content that won’t be read or make a difference.
- Convert your visitors into leads through multiple options, from a phone number displayed in the header to newsletter subscriptions to landing pages and interactive chat windows. You wouldn’t leave your lobby empty, would you? Perhaps it’s time to rethink leaving your website empty, too.
Notice that none of these items included branding, messaging, or design. While those are often the tangible purchases made when shopping for and publishing our websites, they’re by far not the most imperative. Having a beautiful website that doesn’t work is like building your lobby in the back of the building with no lights on, no sign over the door, and no one there to greet your visitors.
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