Build a High-Performance Website for Your Business

Your website is the cornerstone of all marketing activities. It embodies your messaging strategy and facilitates the customer journey taken by potential buyers. It’s the centerpiece for your inbound digital marketing campaigns and a key reference point for buyers who are engaged during an outbound campaign.

Visitors to your website are there on their own. There’s no one to guide them or ask and answer questions. Your website has to perform on its own as well to tell your story and motivate buyer interest and action. It must perform like your best sales rep.

A 10-Point High-Performance Checklist

To know if your website is performing like your best sales rep, conduct an assessment of the best practices followed during its development and upkeep. The following 10-points will help you perform that assessment on your own.

1.  SITE TRAFFIC

This is the digital equivalent of foot traffic in a brick and mortar store. Whether or not you sell products on your website, you need traffic volume to be effective. To maximize traffic, you must leverage as many digital channels as possible. It’s the best way to get found and trigger the sales process. Let’s start the website performance checklist with a purely quantitative question.

Do you have 1,000 to 5,000 visitors coming to your website each month and is traffic steadily increasing?  If so, give yourself a checkmark.

2.  SEO EXECUTION

Your site should be optimized to rank on page 1 or 2 of Google for at least some of your target keywords. Each page on your site provides an opportunity to rank for a search phrase that is important to your buyers. Organic search is a free source of traffic with visitors who are responding to your messaging. To see if you’re fully leveraging the power of SEO, answer the following questions.

Have you performed keyword research, applied them to titles, body copy and meta descriptions (on-page SEO)? Have you developed internal/external links to increase domain authority (off-page SEO)? If so, give yourself another checkmark.

3.  SOCIAL CHANNELS

In addition to organic search, social media is an excellent source of free traffic. Your presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most important. You should have active accounts that crosslink to your site. Be sure to post with enough frequency to reach target buyers (via hashtags) and bring them to various pages on your site.

Do you have an established presence on the top 3 social networks? Do they drive increasing traffic volume to your site?  If so, another check.

4.  ENGAGING CONTENT

Your website has content, but is it engaging content? Does it tell your story in a convincing manner? Does it focus on the problems and pain points of your target buyers? Does it describe solutions to those problems and how they translate to value? Does your content make the case for why your solutions are different and unique? Answer the following question to find out.

Within 3 clicks, can a visitor know who you are, what you do and why they should invest their valuable time to learn more about you? Be honest and give yourself a checkmark.

5.  CUSTOMER EVIDENCE

Building on the concept of engaging content is the notion of customer evidence. It’s vitally important for a young company to build its brand by using the voice of its customers to communicate value. Customer evidence can be as basic as a logo or as elaborate as a case study. Use testimonial quotes and videos to make your point in a simple and powerful way.

Does your site contain customer evidence to communicate and authenticate your value proposition?

6.  MOBILE-FRIENDLY

What used to be an afterthought is now an essential part of web design. Mobile traffic is up 222% in the last 5 years. It now represents more than half of global Internet traffic. Don’t make the mistake of designing your website solely from a desktop perspective. It should be responsive to every screen size for smartphones and tablets.

Have you examined and optimized the user experience of your website for all mobile devices?

7.  METRICS-DRIVEN

You don’t have to be a data scientist to use analytics as a tool to optimize your website. Google provides tremendous visibility into the key metrics for measuring website traffic (volume and sources) and visitor engagement (page views and session duration). You should examine key metrics monthly and use them for continuous improvement.

Do you use monthly website metrics to assess and enhance the performance of your site?

8.  CONVERSION-OPTIMIZED

SEO helps you to get found on the internet. CRO, or conversion rate optimization, helps to convert that traffic into web leads. Don’t leave this to chance. Your site should provide conversion pathways for visitors to follow by tapping their interests and leading them to conversion points. A conversion point is a landing page with a content offer or a call-to-action (e.g., demo, free trial or discovery meeting).

Is your website optimized to drive conversions with multiple call-to-action strategies?

9.  LEAD PRODUCTION

With enough traffic, engaging content, and pathways to conversion points, your website will produce leads for your sales funnel. If any of those elements are missing, your level of lead production will suffer. Your website should function as an engine for generating sales leads that are transferred to sales on a regular basis.

Does your website produce leads at a predictable rate (2% to 5% of monthly traffic)?

10.  SALES ACCEPTANCE

The final measure of an effective website goes one step beyond lead production. The number of website leads accepted by sales is a measure of lead quality. It’s actually more important than lead quantity. When you achieve consistent conversion rates for traffic to leads, to qualified sales opportunities, you’ll have a high-performance website. It’s as if your website were operating as your best sales rep.

Does your website produce a consistent flow of leads accepted by sales?

Take Action to Maximize Website Performance

Now that you have assessed the performance of your website, focus on the areas that need improvement. Start at the top of the checklist and work your way through the entire list. Each step you take will have an impact. The more you optimize each element of performance, the better the overall results will be.

One final point before you make any changes to your website. Be sure you have a solid messaging framework to serve as a foundation for all copy and content on your site. Here is a comprehensive post on building a messaging framework that will show you how to do this with proven techniques and easy-to-follow templates.