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You may not need a web designer at all, but someone to guide you in choosing the right platform, template, and marketing content. Make the right decisions at the beginning to create an effective website that supports your business model and suits your budget now and into the future.
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Choosing the right platform and content strategy according to your budget, tech and marketing skills can be a challenge. Many of our clients weren't sure where to start and we worked through their business and marketing requirements to determine the best solution for them in terms of their tech skills and budget. Updated website strategy increases traffic by 35% and more than triples new orders for Seattle area small business  Year-over-year organic traffic.Covid Shutdown:3/15/20|Website Relaunch:3/26/20|Source:Google Analytics Home-based businesses have an advantage right now, but that doesn’t mean growing one is easy. Here’s how a small business located in Bonney Lake, WA, continues to increase orders and revenue while the rest of the world seems at a relative standstill.  Tom Watson runs Watson’s Wooden Words from his home studio and workshop. It wasn’t always the case. He was a retail manager for Office Depot for 30 years before starting his custom sign business. The idea of doing this for a living started way before his retail days. As a boy, he helped his Dad create trail signs for the California State Parks Department. He knows his way around wood and CNC equipment, and works with a team for painting and finishing. Rather than punching out cookie-cutter signs, he enjoys the creative side the most, working with clients to translate everything from old photos to napkin sketches into works of art.  Using Google Analytics to Identify the ProblemA couple of years ago, Tom decided to learn more about how to grow the business. I met him at a class of mine he attended at the Bellevue Library. A few months later he contacted me to ask how we could work together. His website was my first stop. After a look at the site and review of the data, it became clear Tom was getting a decent amount of organic traffic. It was supplemented with Google Ads, referrals, and just a bit from Facebook, but the website was a dinosaur, resulting in very low visitor quality and conversion. Leads were just dribbling in, 2-3 a week.
How We Decided to Move to a New Website Platform From the beginning, I wanted to update his website to increase conversions from the traffic he was already getting, while driving more organic traffic with the idea that they would be more qualified and engaged (to lead to higher conversions). Tom wasn’t excited about building a completely new website. He had spent quite a lot of money on the old one (and a couple of others before that), and he was leery of throwing more money at the problem. So as a first step, we cleaned up and edited the content and added keywords. The traffic increased somewhat, but we were still experiencing low quality visitor participation, and poor conversion. We needed a much better way to show his portfolio, and the whole website needed to be more visually appealing and branded. After about a year, I finally persuaded Tom to do the site overhaul and a thorough on-site search engine optimization. 6 Changes Increase Traffic and Conversion
Content that converts: We added what I like to call “Decision Helpers” and “Money Pages.” Decision helpers, as the name suggests, build trust and remove the confusion buyers experience when purchasing high involvement products, like creative services. For this site, we added pages demonstrating the sign making process. We’ll use this “bucket” to add more content later, like photos and video. This type of content is also valuable for generating organic traffic. Money pages provide a key signal in the buyer journey, indicating a visitor is on the verge of making a purchase (or generating a lead). It’s important for measuring value, especially if a site isn’t set up for ecommerce. The “How to Order” page in this case is a good example, so a key strategy is to direct visitors to it and to understand which source is sending that valuable traffic. It’s not surprising that Google organic is driving more than 50% of the visitors who end up on that page, because we know that organic has higher purchase intent. Social proof: We used a third party tool to embed Google reviews, and added a “Latest Creations” page with feeds from Facebook and Instagram. It allows Tom to keep the site fresh without a lot of effort.  SEO: We made improvements to all the site’s optimization (titles, descriptions, H1’s, etc.), while keeping the URL’s of the pages that had decent traffic. Position has remained relatively the same for key search terms, yet there’s been a tremendous improvement in impressions, click through and actual clicks.  Improved SEO results in better rank,impressions and click through to the website.Source:Google Search Console (earliest tracking available 4/29/19) Operational improvements: Selling custom, creative products can be a challenge. So beyond driving more traffic and increasing conversions, we wanted to use the website to help Tom be more efficient when working with clients. We built in functionality on the Contact page that allowed visitors to upload their artwork, added a design resources page, and built a “catalog” for sign hanging hardware to assist added value sales. As Watson’s gets busier, we’ll be introducing other website strategies to reduce labor, while continuing to increase revenue. More than 35% Increase in Qualified Traffic — Conversions and Sales Way Up  Beyond improved acquisition numbers, year-over-year quality metrics are way up thanks to the site redesign. Visitors are sticking around to see what Watson's is up to. All indicators are positive, and we’re ticking all the right boxes (year over year data):
 Tom couldn’t be happier. While walking his dog Rambo the other day, he called me to say, jokingly, he’s got too much work now. In fact, we’ve had to turn off his ads until he can catch up with all the orders. That’s a problem most small businesses would love to have. About Watson's Wooden Words Watson’s Wooden Words, located in Bonney Lake, WA, creates custom wood signs for homes and businesses using old world craftsmanship and modern technology. About Robbin Block Robbin Block is the Owner and Creative Marketing Strategist at Blockbeta Marketing located in Seattle, WA. She takes a big picture approach to help expanding businesses strengthen their brand and amplify results. Robbin specializes in working with complex, often high ticket/lower volume manufacturers, makers, services, consultants or online publishers.
 If you don’t know what’s on your customer’s mind, what you say on your website won’t matter. Photo: Vassiliki Koutsothanasi Psychographics outweigh demographics when communicating with customers. Learn 9 ways to research your customer’s psychographics and how to apply the idea to your website. Has anyone ever told you, “It’s not about you?” When it comes to websites, that’s especially true. Building a website that pleases visitors needs to be about them — the ones you’re trying to attract and engage. Understanding how they think and what they care about will help you communicate in a way that gets them to do what you want them to do. If you show that you "get" them, they're more likely to believe you're the one that can solve their pain, need or concern. Psychographics Over Demographics Demographics alone — the hard facts, like age, education and income — can be limiting. Crossing boundaries to focus on what’s meaningful to visitors, rather than for example making generalizations about someone’s age, is more effective for creating real connections with consumers. That meaning is captured in the term psychographics — a person’s occupation, interests, lifestyle and personality (values, opinions, attitudes). The better you understand your consumer, the more you can communicate in a persuasive way. How to Research Your Audience’s Psychographics Understanding your own customers, will help you find more of the same. Do at least one of the following, and you’ll be on your way to understanding what makes your customer tick:
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