Keep Visitors Coming Back To Your Website

SALES & MARKETING

Keep Visitors Coming Back To Your Website

Discover how fresh content and SEO can make the difference in your site’s success — and how to find time to get the job done. April 26, 2010
By Deborah Sexton, Contributing Writer

Imagine visiting a retail store with dusty items on display in the window, aging signs with misspelled words, and out-of-style products for sale. Sounds unappealing, right? While most companies wouldn’t dream of leaving their brick-and-mortar business in such a sorry state, all too many let their online content gather virtual dust — and turn away potential customers in the process.

“If you have news on your site that’s three years old, either remove the date or remove the content,” says Internet expert Jason Sherrill, president, Inet Solution, Utica, Mich. “Content should be updated at least every six months. In an ideal world, you would update it on a weekly basis.”

Besides keeping the interest of visitors, fresh content also can help give your site a higher ranking in search engine results. “Search engines pay attention to frequent content changes. If it doesn’t change for a year, they might consider the information less relevant than the content on a competitor’s site that’s updated every three days,” Sherrill says.

The amount of time it takes to keep your website fresh depends entirely upon how much content you regularly add. For instance, Greg Kitson, president, Mind’s Eye Graphics, Decatur, Ind., says his staff spends about 45 minutes per week on its website, whether it’s reading comments sent via the site or tweaking navigation. “We have a three-click rule: It shouldn’t take visitors more than three clicks to find something; if it takes more, we redesign the navigation,” he says.

Kitson does larger, more comprehensive changes on an annual basis. “We change the site’s navigation and architecture once a year, and then we completely redesign it every three or four years.”

John Martin, owner, Jester Apparel, Fairfax, Iowa, maintains his company’s site by working on it himself as time allows. “I got fed up with what Web designers wanted to charge me, so I took a two-week course at a local community college to learn the basics.”

Extending Your Reach
As much effort as it may require, keeping your content fresh and impactful doesn't guarantee that visitors will simply start showing up in droves. Attracting a meaningful online audience requires the same type of strategic marketing effort that it takes in the real world to draw people to your shop.

Consider that customers often search for companies online by typing a service name into a search engine and then clicking on one of the results. For instance, a Web user in Dallas looking for T-shirts for his band might type “T-shirt band Dallas” into the Google search engine. Your job is to make sure that you’re one of the highest-ranking results listings — and that’s no easy task. In fact, there’s an entire discipline centered on getting your name to appear at or near the top of search engine results: search engine optimization (SEO).

“A lot of small businesses think that because they’re local, they don’t need to show up in search engines, but that’s not true,” Sherrill says. “Your site needs to be optimized for search engines because so many people use the Internet to find contact information. You also need to register with Google for local searches; don’t just rely on them to pick you up.”

Short of becoming an SEO expert (or hiring one), there are a few simple things you can do to optimize your rankings, including adding relevant keywords to your Web pages. “My website’s title is ‘Cedar Rapids Custom T-Shirt/Screen Printing,’ and the keywords include ‘design shirts online.’ Doing this got me listed as No. 1 in my area,” Martin explains. “You can add keywords and a description to every page. When Google finds your page, it will have the descriptive title, keywords and description.”

Sam Wildt, president, Palomar Printing, Worcester, Mass., says SEO is critical to his shop’s success. “We do great search engine optimization, so people think we’re local to them,” he says. “We make sure that we can be found on the Web.”

Decorators also can generate traffic — and higher search engine results — by linking their website to other social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. “I created a fan site on Facebook, and that can link to a Twitter account,” Martin says. “Also, put your website address on everything.”

Martin dipped his toe into Internet advertising, spending about $50 on Google ads, but didn’t get any orders from it. “We’ll start that up again this year. We’re working on adding artwork to the site, getting it looking great.”

Rather than using search engine optimization to attract a mass of visitors, Kitson has used it to funnel the right kinds of customers to his site. “We’re very selective about who we do business with,” he explains. “We’ve actually taken certain words off the site because they attracted people who wanted onesies and twosies.”

Outsourcing the Job
If all of this work to maintain your content and attract traffic sounds a bit demanding, that’s because it is. “You have decide if you want to be the geek — the one who maintains it, puts content up, suffers through all that — or do you want to pay someone to do it for you?” Kitson says.

Your company’s website is your online identity, salesperson, store, information warehouse and more, so it’s understandable that keeping it optimized requires a time investment. If your schedule doesn’t allow you or your staff to maintain the site, consider hiring a vendor to help with the task. Kitson keeps a contractor on retainer to handle his site’s technical issues. “We use him about 10 to 12 hours every quarter to make sure the major things work,” he says.

Adds Sherrill, whose company offers assistance in website maintenance: “We can save businesses a significant amount of time and money. We’re more efficient, and we have discounts because of the volume of advertising we do. You’ll pay us a fee, but you end up with more time to focus on your business. There’s a reason why we don’t buy T-shirt presses and do our own printing: It’s not what we do and make our money at.”

Relying on seasoned vendors also can provide higher-quality content for your website. “We’re big proponents of using professional copywriters,” Sherrill says. “You get more credibility when the grammar is clear. Also, professionals know how to write for the Web. People read differently online than they do with print. Your job is then to just spend a few minutes with the writer generating story ideas.”

David Mead, Logo Factory, Palmyra, N.Y., who says he updates his company’s site about twice a year, acknowledges that his company could garner more online sales with stronger content. “There’s no question in my mind about that,” he says. “We do it ourselves and it shows. We don’t have the time or talent to devote to the site. We hope to hire a professional in the future; they’re expensive, but worth the money.”

Deborah Sexton, the former editor of Impressions, has been writing about the decorated apparel industry for 28 years. For more information or to comment on this article, e-mail Deborah at dsexton@sbcglobal.net.

Content Management Systems
Although visitors won’t recognize that you’re using this back-end tool, a CMS will make the job of adding and updating content infinitely easier. For example, rather than digging into HTML coding every time you want to add an image, you can simply upload the image using a relatively simple interface that requires no programming knowledge.

Content management tools range from free for open-source packages up to tens of thousands of dollars for high-end systems. Most decorators would do fine with a simple, low-cost solution such as Adobe Contribute, which sells for about $200. Visit the CMS Matrix Website for a grid that compares features and pricing for a host of content management systems.

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