Should your website be put out of its misery? Photo: Time Magazine

Whenever you’re developing your written web content – be it the static web copy or a continuously updated web content marketing feature like a blog – you need to ask if you’re meeting a number of different criteria for success:

1. Is this informative and useful?
2. Is this engaging or perhaps even entertaining?
3. Is this relevant to my business and audience?
4. Is this worded nicely without typos or grammar issues?
5. Is this the truth?
6. Is this going to come up (higher the better) on a search engine results page when someone is looking for the kind of information, products or services I offer? (So important and so often overlooked!)

All of these lead to the big question:

7. Is my website going to help me acquire, keep and grow business?

Well – will it? Be honest, people.

I can’t tell you how often I come across corporate websites that could probably only answer yes to one or two of the questions posed above. Or worse yet, companies that don’t think those answers matter to their overall bottom line.

Maybe you’ve seen these websites yourself. They’ve often plunked some decent money down on a flash animation splash page (yarg), undoubtedly scrutinized over which “business” stock photos to include and then spent oodles of time refining the bios of their corporate exec team (yawn). And like all things tedious and horrible, it probably took them a year to get there and no one wants to go through that hell for a very long time – so they settle for it. These are the types of online storefronts that make me wish Dr. Kevorkian would expand his services to include websites.

Don’t mistake this for a rant that is exclusively the opinion of a snarky web writer and marketer who deals with this kind of thing all the time. Audiences are now far more savvy that you probably give them credit for. They can spot a lame duck of a site (if they even ever see yours to begin with) a mile away. Is that really the impression (and it’s often the first and last one) you want to make?

Admitting you have a problem is the first step. If you’re not sure of what to do after that, contacting a web content marketing agency is the next one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 24th, 2009 at 4:22 pm and is filed under Content Creation, Content Marketing, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.