A website is important for businesses of all types, but it’s perhaps the most important for local businesses. Acting as a digital storefront for your organization, it’s inherently important to establish and maintain a site in order to get your name out in front of the public eye and give yourself an opportunity to stand out in front of the competition.
Perhaps you designed a website when you first started your business or when the Internet first came around. While it’s certainly better to have some type of presence on the web than no presence at all, the truth is that if it hasn’t been revamped in a long time, your antiquated website could be doing more harm than good for your business.
Technology is ever-changing, and so are the requirements of web browsers. If your site is outdated, isn’t visually stimulating, loads slowly, isn’t mobile-friendly, or optimized for modern search engine optimization (SEO), there’s a pretty good chance that your potential (and even your current) customers are going to pass right over it.
If you can’t remember the last time you redesigned your website or worse, you’ve never redesigned it, here’s a look at three reasons why you really need to consider a redesign ASAP.
User Experience Matters
Technology is constantly changing, which means that user-needs are also constantly changing and becoming more demanding. In order to keep your target audience happy, you need to make sure that your site is meeting their needs.
If your site loads slowly, has a poor layout, isn’t mobile-friendly (just to name a few things), it isn’t going to be very user-friendly. By redesigning your website, you can assure that it will be appealing and engaging for your audience. After all, great user engagement is one of the most important aspects of modern search algorithms.
More than Just a Billboard
Back in the early days of website design, people just threw up a couple of pages, and those pages contained nothing but information that related to their businesses. While that might have been sufficient a few years ago, today it’s definitely not.
Your website needs to be more than just a billboard for your business. It needs to contain a lot of information, and that information needs to not only be pertinent to your business, but also about the industry that your business applies to. In other words, it should be a valuable resource that your targeted audience can rely on for the information that they seek. Plus, the more value a website offers, the more valuable search engines are going to find it, thus its rankings will increase.
Redesigning your site can transform it from nothing more than an invaluable billboard to something that users and search engines will find extremely useful.
Conversion Minded
A website that doesn’t convert is a complete waste of traffic. Brad Dery of NDS Digital explains, “The entire point of attracting traffic to your business website is to create conversions. While your site may have tons of visitors, if they aren’t contacting you, filling out forms, or making purchases, they aren’t converting, and all of that traffic is for naught.”
Modern analytics will allow your site to have a more intelligent design that will help to increase your conversion rate so that you can get the most out of your traffic and marketing budget.
The Bottom Line
If you are relying on an outdated version of your website, chances are that it isn’t doing much for your business. By redesigning your site, you can ensure that it meets the needs of today’s users and algorithms, and sit back and watch your success grow.
