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Everyone wants to grow their business, but not everyone has the time or patience to learn all the ins and outs of marketing, sales enablement, and making the most out of a CRM such as HubSpot. Join the Web Canopy Studio team, a HubSpot Diamond Partner Agency, as they chat about various topics all designed to help you grow your B2B business.
(00:00):
Never, never, ever, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, build a website without doing this first. What are those things we're about to go through? I'll tell you in one second. My name is John Aikin. I'm the CEO of Web Canopy Studio, and this is the website conversion show.
(00:25):
I have seen a number of people who have come through the old Web Canopy Studio office and asked us to do a little website critique before we get started on anything. And it's always you, you can always tell the people who don't have a clue what they're doing and God love 'em. Like you can't feel bad. Like everybody who's tried to do their own website at one point or another have, you know, either just said, Hey, I'm gonna follow along with whatever this outline from WordPress gives me or from this other company. Or they're just like, screw it, I'm gonna wing it. I'm just gonna go on my own and make the whole thing happen. And yeah, there's some, some of it's good, sometimes there's usually like a gold nugget that you can pull out of it, but it's pretty obvious when people are just kind of winging it when they're just kind of going with whatever they got to try and make something work.
(01:13):
It's pretty easy to spot those that are just kind of thrown together in a really poor way. And so what I wanna do today is outline just a handful of the steps, really there. There's four main things, arguably five, we could add a few more, but the, like, the, the, the main things that you should never, ever, ever leave out before you go and build a new website. So I'm speaking to all of you small business owners, you entrepreneurs out there, you small SaaS companies who are just getting started, and you're gonna throw together a quick site and say, oh, this is our website. Or maybe you're a new marketing director and you're coming in and you're gonna, you're sitting in this seat and the first thing you wanna do is put together this website to, to kind of set the tone for the brand.
(01:54):
Or maybe you're passing it off to somebody else who's gonna do the website for you or with you. Just please don't let it be like your nephew's best friends sister who, whatever, right? Like, make sure it's somebody who has a legitimate source of what they're doing, but you wanna make sure that they don't forget any of these steps. All right, so without further ado, let's dive into the, the most important things that you have to do before you start any new website. Project number one, the first thing that we have to make sure that we are doing is review our current site. We're gonna look at a site audit. There's a number of free tools out there that will give you a site audit, that will score your website based on, you know, all kinds of things within seo, within credibility, within content, and so on.
(02:38):
Create a new site audit. You're, you're gonna look at things like, what kind of content do I have? What are we currently ranking for? Where are the places that we are really, really struggling? Google has wonderful tools for this. You can look at all the different things inside of lighthouse and a bunch of different, you know, quick reference guides in order to figure out what are the really critical items of the site that that should not be addressed or that should be addressed. So we're gonna look at a site audit as number two, number number one. Number two, we're gonna look at outlining our goals. My biggest concern is this, it's that we're gonna just go through the website because we know we need to do a website. And so we're just gonna go through and make a site and it's gonna say, okay, well the, the owner of the company said he wanted to put X, Y, and Z on the site, so we're just gonna do that.
(03:28):
And we make it kind of, you know, whatever we need it to be. And we go off and we look at our competitors and we go off and look at our friends from college and what their companies are doing, and we find other people that we happen to just like their website and we start piecing together the things on that, on our website based off of that data. And that becomes our website. That is, it's okay from an inspiration standpoint. Like, I get it, I do the same thing. I see people's websites all the time, and I'm like, that's really cool. That's a really great, you know, I look at websites for the last 13 years and a nice still, I'm looking at things, I'm like, Hey, that's a really genius way of solving that problem. But we can't let that be our entire website process, right?
(04:11):
We can't let that be the thing that drives everything that we do because it's not unique to the goals that we have. So we have to set our own goals, we have to get some clarity around where are we going, what is our finish line? I can't tell you how to do anything on your website if I don't know where you want to be in two years, if it's even gonna be the same website, is the internet even gonna be the same in, you know, 2, 3, 4 years? I guarantee it won't. So how do we build the website in a way that it evolves and that it's ready to, to, to, to handle these kind of transitions in the market? Well, we need to look at things like, like purpose and, and reasons and why we have this specific website in the first place. Is it lead generation?
(04:55):
A lot of the times people come and they, I'm doing like a discovery call with them. I'm, I'm talking to them in some kind of a strategy session and they are telling me we need a new website cuz the brand just doesn't look right, the brand doesn't look good. We're not getting enough brand recognition. Okay, I understand. Walk me through what does that mean? And lo and behold, the actual issue that they have, the actual reason that they need a new website in the first place is because they're not getting lead. They're not getting calls on their calendar, they're not getting people to book demos. And so they're just not generating customers, therefore, they're not getting a positive return on investment from what it is that they are spending their money on, which is website and marketing tools. Okay? And so what we wanna do is understand how we can make the website in two years or one year, whatever the finish line is for us, how we can make the website actually be a major catalyst for that growth.
(05:47):
How can we have the website be one of the biggest vehicles, the biggest driver of taking us from where we are to where we're going, right? We have to set goals and we have to make benchmarks and progress points along the way. Number three, when we know our goals, we wanna start diving into the ways that we can hit our goals. And again, this is all before anything is done on the website. This is before anything is done on the website. So we wanna understand our audience so that we know what it is we're trying to do with them in order to hit our goals. We're not going to land a bunch of clients if we're not answering a bunch of problems that our clients have. We're not gonna be able to bring clients to us if the website's not answering or solving the problems or the issues that people are having regularly.
(06:31):
Okay? No one's gonna book a call on your calendar if your calendar's not even there, right? So we need to start looking at, we'll look at the goals and then we wanna start looking at what the audience needs, what our customers, where our persona needs in order to break down little by little as time goes on, how we're gonna help them get there. All right? So that's number three. Understanding our audience, understanding their pains, understanding their challenges. Number four is around making a site map, right? We easily, easily would get lost if we go and drive off into another state and we have no clue where we're going. We're not on the interstate, we're driving through county roads in some foreign place. We have never been, ever, and we're expected to then figure out how to get somewhere else once we're there, once we're lost, okay?
(07:19):
We have to treat our website the exact same way, not only from a user perspective to make it super easy for your customers to know exactly like that what they're looking for, that they're gonna get what they need and they're gonna have questions answered. But also from a usability standpoint, if you have other people working on your website and they're working as part of your marketing team, if they're going through different scenarios of questions and content and pieces and they don't know what it's for or where it's going, you need to be like, Hey, these are the main problems. They're gonna go on this page, this page, and this page, because the site map is there and the site map is answering these questions for those pages. That's gonna be a very, very easy transition for you to go from confusion to clarity. And what does a site map need to look like?
(08:04):
Well, sitemap is a very funny word because it's not necessarily defined and used consistently across the board. There are site map files that you can create that are automatically created for you on most website platforms or plug-ins. And those files basically tell search engines what content exists on your site and what pages are are child pages to parent pages and so on. You don't really have to worry about that too much most of the time. That's all addressed for you. When we use the term site map, we're specifically thinking of the guide, the guardrails, the, the map, the literal map of what is being built or what is going to exist and why. And so you could even just use a simple Excel spreadsheet and list out all the pages. You wanna list out what content is on those pages or what the purpose of that page is, who it's for and so on.
(08:56):
And when you have this map, okay, you can now go look at the audit and see if you missed anything. See if there's anything critical that was listed on the audit of this is really good or this is really bad, or we need to address it. You can look at your goals, right? We've outlined the, the goals of the website and we can say we have or have not set in motion a plan to start hitting these goals based off of those pages. You know very well. If the goal is to get a bunch of people to learn about this kind of product and there's zero content around that product and the problems that it solves and, and the ways that your customers are gonna be able to get value from hearing from you, well then we have a gap in our site map that we have to fill and we need to go and start programming what that looks like.
(09:40):
Okay? So those are all the examples inside of, of using our our site map. And again, the other piece of just understanding the audience and where they want to go and what, what else they need and making sure things exist there. The last piece of this, we'll call it the fifth. You, you could, I mean, there's tons of other things we could add in if we really wanna get granular around technical setup and things like that. But the fifth thing that I would add into here, which kind of ties onto the fourth one, is around a redirect strategy, a proper 3 0 1 redirect strategy. The, the issue that a lot of people see when they go from one website to another is a drop in traffic and they're concerned, especially when they move from one platform to another. And I would be concerned too, I would not wanna spend money and, you know, risk losing a lot of credibility and risk losing traffic and potential customers.
(10:30):
And it's scary. It's not fun. One of those reasons why that happens though is because of a poor 3 0 1 redirect strategy or no 3 0 1 redirect strategy at all. And I know a lot of you're hearing me say redirects 3 0 1 s. Like what does that mean? I don't even know what that means. Let's say today your website exist, it has 25 pages on it. It's been around for five or six years, okay? 25 pages existing on the website today. And in the new website that you're designing, that you're developing or that your site map is laid out to address, there's only 22. So what has to happen is we're going to have to kill some of those pages that don't need to exist anymore. Whether they're consolidated, whether it's like an old thing that's not even a a page anymore, there's no, no use to talk about it.
(11:17):
So we're going to remove that page from the site. Seems like a pretty normal thing. It's housekeeping, it's house cleaning, we're going to a new site, let's make it look good and be, be as appropriate and effective as possible. But what happens is, if we don't tell the search engines that, Hey, this site used to have a bunch of other pages and they're no longer here, but now instead of pointing at those pages, we want you to go look over here. Instead, we are creating this thing where we're having Google look at the site and say, I used to have 25 sources and now I have 22 sources. What gives, what do I do? And dock your website. And so what ends up happening is in a really large side or, or a large website migration, we have the situation where there's lots of different links or domains or URLs changing.
(12:07):
And that's the other thing is like when, when pages change name. So it might be website.com/ 1 23 and in the new website, it's website.com/blog/ 1 23. And if we don't appropriately tell Google, Hey, this changed and you gotta send that content there, well, we're gonna have a drop in traffic and it's going to harm us over time. So proper redirect strategy is essential and troll and all of those together are what's gonna make your website really, really solid foundationally when you're moving into into the design, the development, the content stage, wire framing and so on. Arguably, I could probably go on and on and on about several others, but those are the key critical ones that you never want to build a website without at least having some kind of thought towards that. Let us know if you guys have any questions. I think that's it for the day and we'll catch you next time.
(12:57):
Thank you. Oh, one more thing, by the way, website conversion assessment. You haven't checked it out yet. You need to, I don't know why you haven't checked it out yet. Webcanopystudio.Com/Assessment. It is awesome. It's 30 questions. It's on a website. It's a, essentially, it's like a quiz calculator kind of thing. And you're gonna go through and answer 30 different questions based off of these six different kinds of elements at your website need to possess in order to get really strong conversions and really strong lead generation happening. And so it's gonna give you these open questions. You're gonna answer them honestly for, on a scale of one to five, how you feel you're doing in each of those. And based off of your answers, it's gonna provide to you the, the, the recommendations and the guidelines and the outlines that you should look into as you go and, and evolve within your own website strategy. So all that being said, take a look webcanopystudio.com/assessment and we'll catch you next time.