How would you feel if your business’ greatest advocate wasn’t actually promoting you? A dose of disappointment at best.
Like it or not, your website has the power to make or break your brand’s reputation. Here are three ways that your website can work for you or against you.
Brand Representation
The primary, and most direct way a website can impact a business’ reputation is how well it represents its brand. A website, when built strategically, with on point brand messaging, and modern design, has the power to transform new visitors into clients. Cultivate new clients over a period of time, called “lead generation” in marketing-speak, is how many professional services, consultants, and entrepreneurs do business online.
So when a new visitor strolls past your online front door, it’s a critical opportunity to present your brand with its best foot forward. Does your brand represent your business digitally as well as if you were speaking face to face to a new client? If your online presence isn’t doing your brand justice, your website is losing out on opportunities to convert new visitors into customers. Those first few seconds on your website have the opportunity to repel potential customers, confuse them, or convert them. Your website is not neutral!
This factor tends to become personal quickly, as a poor, underwhelming association with a brand has an equivalent correlation with how people respond to promotional offers made. A website that doesn’t represent well can be embarrassing, but even worse, any advertising dollars directed towards it will not be as profitable as hoped.
Website Health
Just like our bodies, websites need regular care and maintenance to stay at optimal performance. The passing of time, lack of updating, and stagnancy take a huge toll on a website’s searchability in Google (and other search engines) and website health. Think of how often a phone needs updated to keep functioning well. Without regular technical maintenance and security scans, a website can be hacked and become vulnerable to attack.
If updates aren’t applied to proactively manage the many software processes integrated within a website, technical conflicts begin to happen, resulting in a site that breaks down. Google’s algorithm is known to penalize sites that don’t perform well and aren’t optimized to provide the user what they are searching for.
Skip to the end… a broken site not only looks unprofessional, but also ends up needing a lot of technical support (which can be costly) and may have search engine optimization issues that are not easily reversed.
Outdated Content
Who wants to be promoting an outdated site? Unfortunately, it happens all too easily, and even with the best of intentions. If a business or organization doesn’t have an in house website manager, there isn’t a dedicated process for making regular website updates.
An outdated website unfortunately says a lot about the business it represents.
But… it doesn’t have to be this way. Scale Up serves to ensure that your business does not end up promoting last year’s info. With a variety of options for monthly content additions, you can make small updates and improvements on a regular basis, keeping your website fresh and relevant. Plus, the added benefit is that Google rewards websites that add content regularly and maintain their website authority.
Proactive Care = Protecting your Brand
When you think about the amount of effort it takes to build a brand and grow a business, it’s definitely worth protecting. The solution is simple- proactive technical maintenance, intentional content updates, and strategic marketing efforts. Scale Up Website Design and Management exists to meet all of these needs with a comprehensive, all-in-one service.
Interested in learning more about about our monthly plans? Learn more here, or contact us to discuss your site’s unique needs!
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