Your website contains the heart and soul of your business. It is a repository of important information that represents the core identity of your company. Your website also reflects the personality of your business and it plays an integral role in establishing your brand as a serious player in your industry.

A business’s online presence can have a significant impact on its success. The vast majority of customers will not make a purchase before visiting a company’s website. In fact, online media research shows that 93 percent of business purchase decisions begin with a search engine search of websites. That means that if you don’t have a website for your business, you are only selling to 7 percent of your market.

So why wouldn’t you want to optimize the effectiveness of your website to ensure you are maximizing your reach to your ideal target audience? If you are a credit union or other small business, you already know that your website is the conduit between your business and your potential customers. You rely on your website to generate leads so you can continue to replenish your new customer pool. If your website fails your business, your company will gradually lose its competitive edge and your revenue will drop, leaving your bottom line in an unstable condition.

Reasons Your Website Might be Failing Your Credit Union

 Your website might not be delivering the results you need for a variety of reasons. There could be technical and aesthetic aspects of your site that are faulty and don’t engage visitors and motivate them to explore and purchase your products or services.

 But based on our experience with clients at Lemon Head Design, we believe that your credit union or small business might be losing out on new customers with an ineffective website as a result of five primary factors:

1)     Your website is not in compliance with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

2)     Your business is not creating compelling, relevant marketing website content on a regular basis (on-site SEO).

3)     You have no backlinking strategy in place (off-site SEO) to raise your business’ stature and credibility within your industry.

4)     You have not implemented PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing to help people quickly and easily find your business online.

5)     Your website is not secure, leaving your website vulnerable to hackers.

 ADA Compliance

If your website is to be successful – the coin of the realm for websites is persuasion and conversion – it needs to remove any possible barriers to action, with the ultimate action being the purchase of your goods and services.

As has been apparent for years now, commerce and information-sharing happen online, and, as a result, existing interpretations of the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) have broadened to include websites. In order to be in compliance with the ADA, websites cannot contain obstacles that prevent people with disabilities from participating.

Although the ADA does cite specific web accessibility standards, the Department of Justice has acknowledged that under Title III of the ADA, places of public accommodation must either ensure their websites are accessible, or provide “an accessible alternative.”

The Department of Justice evaluates web accessibility by whether or not it meets the technical requirements of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, Level AA.

Content is King When it Comes to Your Website

If you want your website to display well on search engines, you must create compelling and relevant marketing content on a regular basis. In fact, the right content could raise your SEO (Search Engine Optimization), making it much easier for Internet users to find your company online.

The content on your website provides information that shapes how search engines interpret your website for online shoppers. You need to optimize your content in such a way that search engines know what it is exactly that your business is selling, and in the clearest possible terms.

In order for search engines like Google and Bing to interpret your website as being active, it is important you update your website content frequently – ideally once or twice a month. The overarching goal with this new, fresh content is for search engines to crawl your website pages and recognize keywords and increase your SEO. 

People – including those who fit your target audience – will visit your website with specific intentions or goals in mind.  Each time an Internet user comes to your site, they are evaluating the quality and value of your content.  If your content is refreshed regularly and is persuasive and relevant, you just might convert that visitor into a new customer!

Backlinking Will Get Your Website Noticed

Think about this:  if a billboard promoting your business is perched in the middle of a desert, who’s going to see it?  What good will that do when it comes to getting your business noticed? You might have a stellar business that sells great products, but if your website doesn’t present your business in a way that enables you to stand out in your industry, and in the marketplace in general, it could be relegated to white noise.

Google gives domain rating authority to select websites and the surest way to achieve that status for your business website is by implementing backlinking strategies.

Lemon Head Design typically starts a new client with 100 backlinks on average per month.

A backlink, also known as “inbound” or “incoming” links, are created when your website links to another website. For example, if a clothing store (Website A) links to a blog post about upcoming fall fashions (Website B), the website promoting the fall fashions receives a vote of confidence – or backlink – from the clothing store site.

Backlinks are important because they alert Google that another online resource finds your website content sufficiently valuable to link to it within their own content. As a website earns additional backlinks, search engines interpret that the website offers valuable content worth ranking well on the Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs. As a result, people in your target audience are more likely to find your website based on the products or services they are seeking.

Pay-Per-Click is the Foundation for Website Marketing

PPC, or pay-per-click marketing, is a way of using search engine advertising to generate clicks to your website. When you come across sponsored ads located at the top of Google’s search results page, marked with a yellow label, that is PPC advertising or Google Ads PPC.

PPC works this way:  every time your ad is clicked, sending a visitor to your website, your business pays the search engine a small fee. This is what gives it the name, “pay per click.” If you implement a well-designed PPC campaign, you will discover that the visit to your site is easily worth the modest fee. For example, if you pay $15 for a click, but the click results in a $250 sale, then PPC is a viable enterprise to potentially fuel considerable growth for your business.

The Success of Your Website Rests Heavily on its Security

Nothing else matters when it comes to various elements of your website if it is not secure. Web security is important to keep hackers and cyber thieves from accessing sensitive information about your business. Without a proactive security strategy, businesses like yours risk the spread and escalation of malware, attacks on their websites, networks, and other IT infrastructures.

This is why it is critical to keep your website code updated as hackers are constantly on the lookout for vulnerabilities.  It is essential for your business to be proactive and frequently have server and code maintenance completed.

Let Lemon Head Design Help Your Business Succeed Online

Lemon Head Design is a web services agency that has a proven track record of helping businesses be successful with well-designed, money-making websites. Our award-winning designers produce websites with the user in mind so businesses can more easily connect with potential customers.

Among the online services we provide are Web development, Web maintenance, graphic design, marketing services, and Chatbot with Live Chat and SMS.

With Lemon Head Design, we will create a professional, eye-catching website that attracts the people you want as customers, all while contributing to your bottom line! 

For more than a dozen years, Lemon Head Design has been the premier source for website design in Utah. We have helped hundreds of our clients succeed online.  Why shouldn’t our next client be you?