Each week I am auditing websites for current clients, my coaching clients, and potential clients. I have come across five mistakes that everybody just needs to stop doing on their website and ways to correct them.
First one, stop using stock images on your website. It's great in the beginning for placeholders until you get pictures taken, but here's why you need to do this. There's really two reasons why. One is people who are coming to your website are hiring you, okay? If you don't put yourself on that homepage, they aren't really knowing who they're hiring. If you are a company, put your staff on the homepage. If it's just you, put you on the homepage. If you're a product or even a service, put yourself with the product you're selling. Personal brand right now is one of the most important things out there that's happening marketing trend wise. Even if you are just a brand, making it a little more personal will really help.
Here's a quick little story. Last year I was asked to apply for a request for proposal against some big companies. What they told me, the reason why they hired me, is they went to my homepage and they knew exactly who they were working with. They went to my competitor's homepage and there were stock images. It wasn't really clear who they'd be working with, and so I got hired because of that reason. That is actually one of the biggest tips I tell people. Put yourself, or you somehow, or your team on your homepage. The other part of this is you really want to be authentic, so if it's just you that they're going to be working with, put you on there. Don't make it look like some big company. People want to hire you.
The second trick here is don't use tricky terminology. A lot of times when I talk to people, I talk about SEO and I've really dumbed it down to say something like searchable content because people understand what that means. They don't understand what SEO means. If you're using tricky terminology to explain what you're doing, try to dumb it down because that just loses people some times.
The third thing that I see people I'm not doing, they're not collecting email addresses. I know we all hate popups, but they're actually the most effective way to build your email list. Put a pop up or some way on the top fold of your website to collect email addresses.
The fourth mistake I'm saying is people just build a website and don't do anything with it after that. All right? Their website is static and a static website is to hurt you, especially when it comes to search. In few weeks we're going to talk about content ideas, but figure out a way to add content on a regular basis to your website, at least once or twice a month.
The fifth mistake that I see people making is not including their website in their marketing plan. When you do this, you kind of get in this consistent habit of updating your website. Make sure you're adding your website to your marketing plan.