If You Don’t Take Care of Your Website, It Won’t Take Care of Your Business

/in , ,

Take Care of Your Site for Reliable Lead Generation

Developing the JumpStart 2018 series of blog posts was good for our agency. We applied the techniques and exercises that we successfully use in helping our clients to focus and be strategic for ourselves. After all, just because we’re a marketing agency doesn’t mean we don’t face the same struggles in Marketing Land as our clients. We are all living and working in complicated, overwhelming times. It takes proactive, deliberate effort to push forward and move the needle in today’s world. As a result, we have our marketing plan in place plus an ongoing list of tasks and initiatives dedicated to the proper care and feeding of our website to ensure reliable lead generation.

As a business owner, I rely on our website to generate new business opportunities for our agency and keep our sales pipeline full. This is why one of my business objectives for 2018 is: We are tending to our website on a weekly basis in order to ensure that it’s a steady, reliable lead generation machine for our agency.

The reality is that having a website that is a reliable lead generation machine takes a village. It’s not realistic for one webmaster to know how to do it all. In our agency, we have someone who eats, sleeps and breathes Google and keeps us up to speed on any/all algorithm and protocol changes we need to address. She also happens to be a whiz at keyword research. Then, we have an online marketing specialist who studies our Google Analytics every month and strategizes and implements various ways for us to grow our online presence. We have a web developer (or, web mechanic as I like to call him) that troubleshoots and fixes the annoying, inevitable issues that arise when you’re really paying attention to what’s going on with your website. He also helps us add new functionality to our site. Add to this mix a designer and copywriter who fuel our site with new graphics and content to keep it fresh. And then there is me and the rest of our team who pretend we are potential customers and regularly scout around our website calling out issues we spot, mentioning ideas we have for new content and testing functionality.

All of the work we do on our website is documented and maintained so we have a log that we can refer back to in order to recall the work that has been performed. It’s sort of like the records you hope your doctor maintains on your visits but maybe even better.

The reality check that I hope to impart from all of this is that if you’re serious about relying on your website as an integral part of your business — whether for lead generation, recruiting, brand awareness, etc. — it’s not a set it and forget it kind of thing. It requires the ongoing, regular, consistent effort of people who know what they are doing. Plus, it’s becoming more complicated, not less. You need to either staff up with the right mix of talent or outsource it to a team of professionals that do this stuff all day everyday — like us.