Time for your annual web health check: Part 1

And given the recent groundswell of interest in all things web (could we be entering dotcom 2.0?), the online performance of your small business should be one of the areas that gets top priority.

So what better time than this relatively quiet period to examine just how well your business stacks up when it comes to competing online?

In the past I’ve provided a ‘10 Commandments of Web Marketing’ as a means of assessing just how well your web presence is doing against your competition. This checklist continues to prove an excellent way of ensuring that your business is meeting the growing expectations of web users.

All you need to do is give your business a tick for each one of these benchmarks.  Once you’re done we’ll decipher what it all means.

1. We have a professional website which looks good, downloads quickly, has well written text and calls to action and good navigation.

The fewer of these attributes your website has, the more fleeting your prospect’s interest in what you have to offer them. The truth is that these days a substandard website no longer cuts the mustard with increasingly discerning web users.

To give yourself a realistic idea of what you are up against, conduct a Google search for your line of business (potentially in your locality) and see which websites are listed in the results. Have a good honest look at their websites and see what they are doing well (and not so well). If in doubt, ask an objective person to do it with you.

2. Our website has a Content Management System (CMS) which allows us to add or edit pages whenever we need to.

This commandment is far more important to smaller businesses than to larger ones. Because to a larger business, the cost of employing a ‘webmaster’ to constantly update their websites is virtual chickenfeed compared to a smaller business attempting the same. Even if you do have a great web person, what’s to say that your updates are as important as those of a larger client, or that they’ve gone AWOL indefinitely, taking your website’s currency and relevance with them?

A good CMS will allow you to add information to your website whenever you feel the urge – day or night, winter, spring, summer or autumn. And it won’t cost you an extra cent.

3. Our website takes customers and prospects as far through the purchase process as possible (eg. we sell our products online or include a briefing form).

This commandment is one that has met considerable resistance over the years.  “But we prefer to deal with customers in person”, “They can just pick up the phone” etc, are the common retorts.

If this is the way you think about customers these days, you may as well retire right now. Today customers demand to be looked after in the way they want to be. So if that’s via a shopping cart or online booking, so be it. Or by email, Skype, chat and so on. The bottom line is that if you don’t look after them the way they want they will search until they find a business that does (which of course is the real reason why Australians are buying offshore).

4. We are found on the first page of Google and other search engines when searching for our business name.

An absolute fundamental these days. If you are not the first search result (or at least the first handful of searches) for your own name, your business is in deep doo-doos.

Because the first thing a prospect is going to do when they’ve given up searching for you is search for your competitors. It’s marketing suicide and it needs to be given your most serious attention.

5. We are found on the first page of Google and other search engines when searching for our category of business in our location (eg. ‘Architect Burwood’).

If you are appearing well under your own business name, the next challenge is to be prominent among the search results for your line of business in your location.

Google and other search engines have been the first port of call for those looking for suppliers for some years now. And given the mobility that iPhone and its ilk provide, they are now being used on the road as much as at the desktop.

If you service customers within a given area, this objective should again be top priority to ensure you are among the candidates when prospects are ready to buy.

6. We are found on the first THREE pages of Google and other search engines when searching for our category of business in our region (eg. ‘Architect Perth’).

Of course many businesses are less reliant on customers in their immediate area than they are within a region or city area. In this case it’s important that your business is prominent within that wider area when conducting a Google search.

The example given is probably quite appropriate. Architects for example rarely service their immediate area alone. What’s more likely is that they have a speciality within a city, for example ‘sustainable architect’, period renovations, offices and so on. Therefore a combination of the speciality and the wider area serviced are the search terms they should be aiming to ‘own’.

How are you doing so far? If you have between four and six ticks next to each criterion you are doing pretty well.