Most of the time you might think of our company website as simply an informational “brochure”, but the fact is is that your website is there 247, and is much more than informational, it’s an incredible marketing tool! Think of how many employees you have that are willing to be there 247 and provide the exact information about your company in the exactly way you want it presented. So here are at least 5 things your website should have to get you the most out of it.

1. Blog – You need to have a blog and you need to post to it regularly as well as have a link to it from your website. Naturally, the blog will promote itself by being found on your website and when performing related searches in search engines, such as Google. However, the main thing is that you could use your blog to strengthen your relationship with prospects and current customers. What you should do is send prospects & current customers emails with links to posts you write for your blog. When you write a post that is relevant to a prospect or customer, you should send them a link to it via email, etc. On top of that, simply having the blog assessable from your website will allow potential and existing customers to find and read your more about you and your company on a more personal level. Simply stated this keeps you in front of and on the mind of your customers and prospective clients.

2. Call to Action – How good do you think an advertisement would work if you never instructed the prospective customer to buy your product. That’s what you’re doing on your website if you don’t have a call-to-action statement. A call-to-action statement tells your visitor to take some type of action. In most cases, you want them to contact you. The call-to-action should be the main focus of your website. Do this exercise, look at your website and then ask yourself what you want people to do when they visit your website. What would be the ideal situation? Would it be they contact you for business, sign up for a free trial, etc.

3. Good Design – There have been numerous studies that show a better design correlates to an improved perspective of your company. Just think about it, would you be more willing to buy from a website that looked like a 5-year-old put it together or one that was professional and gave you that “wow” feeling when you looked at it.

4. SEO Basics – Every site should at least have the basics in place for search engines. These basics make sure your site can be found and indexed properly by search engines and many times having these basics in place alone will propel your site to the top of searches in Google for particular search phrases.

5. Contact Info – You must have your company’s contact info on your site in an easily accessible way. Moreover, I would go so far as to say you need to have it on every page in a place that’s logical to find. The worst thing would be for a prospective customer not to reach out to you for a purchase just because they could not find your contact information.

6. Well Written Code – This is a bonus item. Honestly most people will never see your site’s code. So why would I say this is important. For a few reasons. For one, having well-written website code allows your site to be upgraded and changed much more efficiently. Well-written code also enables your website to perform and look correctly on most computers and smart phones. You may not know this, but computer monitors come in all shapes and sizes which do affect how your website will look. Some people only have so much restate on their monitor and others have an enormous screen. Making sure your site’s code is optimized for all these viewing sizes and different types of Internet browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari, etc) makes a big impact on your visitor. Same goes for mobile browsing. If you website isn’t viewable or doesn’t function in the most readily used monitor sizes, versions of Internet browsers and mobile phones you’re losing traffic on your site and worse yet, can be losing customers.