We continue to work with estate planning and elder law attorneys to optimize their websites for search engine ranking. But, as many of you probably know -- or suspect -- just getting a good rank position on Google is not enough to ensure revenue growth in your practice. It can ensure good traffic to your site -- but then what?
Last week I had a great consult with a client who is starting to really "get it." Now that his website is optimized, and he is showing up on page one with Google, Bing and Yahoo -- NOW is when the fun really begins. We have the site well-positioned, we've got targeted traffic coming to it -- what we have built is essentially a new marketing medium, a broadcast channel if you will. Now we can use that channel to broadcast targeted marketing messages. We are working on a special veterans promotion, which we plan to follow with a campaign for business owners. We're building off-site marketing to drive additional traffic and continue to boost the rankings.
The bottom line is this -- the website is now dynamic, not static. A website is NOT like a billboard -- post it once in a high-traffic area and hope the calls pour in. It's not like a Yellow Pages ad -- printed once for the entire year. Not at all. Your website should be updated, changed, tweaked, targeted. You wouldn't send the same newsletter out month after month, neither should your website be considered a once-and-done project.
Which leads me to an essential of website design -- it should be flexible. Navigation buttons should be created as TEXT, not GRAPHICS. Why? First, because the search engines prefer text, but just as importantly, because text is quick and easy to change. I can add or delete a message (page), feature a topic (more pages), or rearrange the site in literally minutes if I am just editing text. But when a site is designed with complex graphics, we lose this flexibility. Adding a page is like trying to create and then squeeze-in a new puzzle piece to a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle!
So, when you are working with a website designer -- whether it's Integrity Marketing or someone else -- please insist on the KISS principle -- Keep It Simple Stupid!
Elegant design does not have to be complex. Insist on text-only navigation buttons. Keep the graphics to a minimum and make them slow down on the scripts, too. Scripts take time to run (download) and not everyone has a super high-speed connection! Simple, elegant and flexible -- insist on those qualities in every aspect of your website and you can have a winning site that drives revenue year-round!