The first two elements of the Evaluator results can be achieved without a strategy and any web designer worth his salt can produce a reasonably-designed interface that reflects your brand. The next three elements Interest, In-the-game and Intelligent are dependent on an in-depth understanding of your audience, who they are, what they do and don’t know, how they are most likely to get to your site and what they will do when they get there.
Without this level of planning it is impossible to create a home page that grabs their attention and compels them to go further. Elision is selling to difficult audiences, including public sector and utilities which have complex buying processes but the buyers themselves are no more complex than someone running a small business. By thinking about the individual rather than the organisations they work for, it could provide a more rewarding experience.
The importance of visibility in search engines must not be underestimated. The SEO evaluation shows that it does okay on core keywords, but this is not enough. If I do a search on document scanning services, which is the term I would use as a potential client, I get over 1.5 million returns from UK sites alone and Elision is not on the first 10 pages.
This is relatively easy to fix, but it must be done in the context of the web strategy. By planning the site around the users you invariably end up with content that is more search friendly and easier to optimise.
The last three Evaluator results is where Elision achieves poor scores, averaging just six per cent, and these are the hardest areas to address. But if it wants its site to play an active role in feeding the sales funnel they, are critical. If however, it simply wants the site to support the sales activity then it is not worth investing in these areas.
Business buyers are also changing how they buy. The Internet allows them to carry out early stages of the buying process, deciding who to include in a shortlist, without you knowing they are even looking. So it is becoming imperative that if someone visits your site you know who they are, where they went and capture enough information to be able to contact them directly.
This is a reasonably good first generation website. It’s quite pleasant on the eye, easy to navigate and gives a positive impression of the business it represents. But that is no longer enough. To be effective it needs an investment of time and money. It needs to be re-engineered within the context of a web strategy based on the behaviours of their target audience. Only then will it begin to make a truly positive contribution to the success of the business.
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