Your Firm’s Website Feels Neglected!

How’s your website doing? Have you checked in on it lately? Is it performing the way you expect and need it to? If not, how can you help it improve?

Your website is an incredibly important element of your practice. In many cases, it’s the first opportunity to form a first impression on potential client relationships. Yet, advisor websites, as well as other technologies, are often forgotten about until they become so outdated or dysfunctional that action can’t be procrastinated any further.

In this article, we examine how to think about your website and the easy steps you can take to get it back to a good place that supports the great impact your practice is making.

Don’t Ignore Your Technologies…Including Your Website

Our technologies, such as your website, affect our practices greatly. The more we help, nurture, and enable our websites to grow, the more it will pay off and improve our results. You wouldn’t ignore a member of your team for days, weeks, months, or YEARS…would you? Of course not! Yet so many advisors and small business owners haven’t checked in on their website in a very long time. Why are some resources nurtured, yet others are left to languish and wither away to irrelevance? Think of your website as part of your marketing team and help nurture it to perform at its best!

Even If You’re Not Focused on Lead Gen, Your Website Is Incredibly Important

Even if you don’t plan to use your website as a lead generation tool, it’s still important to make sure that it accurately reflects who you are and performs in such a way that doesn’t accidentally turn people away. If your practice is largely based on recommendations, rest assured that those referred WILL check out your website. And guess what…they will often form an opinion about you and your firm in less than a second, according to statistics by SEMrush. That’s not a lot of time to make a good first impression! Is your website leaving the first impression you want? According to a recent report by Forbes on top website statistics for 2024, 57% of people may choose not to recommend a business if the website is poorly designed 🤯, so keep it looking nice if you want the recommendations to keep funneling in.

Steps to Improve Your Website

Here are some simple things you can check on to make sure that your website is receiving the right level of care:

1. Homepage: Is it engaging above the fold?

‘Above the fold’ is fancy jargon for content that appears on the upper half landing page of a website, typically before you start scrolling down. 57% of the time audiences spend on your website happens within this area¹. That means that this section needs to really convey who you are and be clear about what you want them to do next because you have about five seconds before they move on if they don’t find the thing that gets them to stay, according to the same Forbes report.

2. Calls-to-Action: Are there multiple, compelling calls-to-action on each page? Is there a way to connect with you?

Do you have a call-to-action (CTA) on your website? Well, 7 out of 10 small businesses don’t have any at all, according to Forbes.  We’ve all heard the saying that you won’t get what you want if you’re too afraid to ask. Well, that applies to your website too! Your CTA is asking the visitor to do something, like schedule a meeting, watch a video, and more. It needs to be compelling and offer what marketers refer to as the ‘value exchange.’ This means that the website has provided some value to the audience through the content delivered and in exchange the audience is asked to take additional action. This might mean offering something more than what’s already been provided, like a consultation if they schedule a meeting.

3. Your Brand: Are your values, mission, and purpose represented clearly?

Is your website a showcase for who you are and what you stand for? Or is it a generic set of pages that awkwardly displays the ‘things’ you can do for clients? People are attracted to your unique ‘why’ and not necessarily by what it is you do. If you look at the websites of many of your competitors, I bet you’ll find that a lot of the services listed match yours. Heck, they are probably written in such a way that they sound indistinguishable! Your mission, values, and purpose for being in business are uniquely yours. So, why wouldn’t you want to make that the thing that stands out the most? Psst…you should!

4. Visual Identity: Are images and brand visuals representative of you and your brand?

You likely wouldn’t walk out of your house in clothing that doesn’t reflect your personal taste, style, and personality, right? So why do you let your website look like something that doesn’t match its intended personality? You don’t need to have the fanciest website in the world, those can cost obscene amounts of money, but you can have a site that accurately reflects your brand and uses images that align with the tone and content living on the page. Next time you’re on your site, which I hope is today after reading this article, give it the eye test.

5. Text: Do you have too much? Is it clear, and easy to understand? Does it use the correct heading structure?

Great copy is important for many reasons. It gives readers a compelling reason to stay on the page and take further action. It articulates information clearly so that visitors understand what they might be getting from your service and supports content SEO efforts. However, too much text can make the page feel dense and unreadable. Let’s be honest, our attention spans have shrunk over the years, so visitors need to be able to quickly digest the text on the page in a way that is clear and compelling. Look at your text. Are there redundant sections? Is the information unclear? Can anything be summarized while remaining compelling? Lastly, make sure that your pages organize text properly on the page. This means using headings, like H1, H2, H3, and so on. Most modern CMSs make this very easy to do, so do an audit and make sure the structure is simple and clear.

6. Technical: Do pages load quickly? Do they have errors?

You have about 3 seconds for your site pages to load before audiences say, “I’m out!”¹ People expect quick responses nowadays (see earlier note about short attention spans). Consumer technology is so great that we’ve been conditioned to have this expectation, so when something takes longer people will naturally assume something is wrong and move on. There are many reasons why websites load slowly. Besides a bad connection that is out of your control, a primary culprit is the size of the media and images you might have on your site. Take a look at all of those really nice photos you have on your website and try to reduce the image size without losing quality. There are many available tools to help you do this easily and effectively. Last, but certainly not least, make sure that all of your website pages are actually working and you’re not giving visitors the dreaded 404 Error. If you find some, go in and inspect the links and missing pages ASAP!

7. Mobile: Is your site responsive and mobile-ready?

As of the end of last year, more than half of all web traffic comes through a mobile device¹. And guess what, that number is surely only to increase. When was the last time that you checked on your website from your smartphone? Hopefully, after reading this article, you’re going to quickly jump on your website and run through the things we talked about here. When you do, don’t forget to run the same tests and checks from your phone too. The mobile experience is incredibly important, and it should not be taken for granted. There is a good chance that your website CMS already incorporates responsive design into its system but check to make sure.

Your website is your modern-day storefront. It should be updated regularly with refinements to ensure that it remains an accurate depiction of you and your practice. Contrary to some beliefs, you don’t need to do sweeping website changes all the time. These minor checks and refinements add up to big improvements over the long term and keep your site looking good and running well for long periods. Of course, if something changes in your practice, like a service expansion, staff changes, etc., then make the change to your site. It’s just a good habit to get into because, remember, this is your modern storefront. Make sure that people get a good impression of you when they look inside!

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¹ Forbes Advisor: Top Website Statistics For 2024
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