Ep. 84 Five Website Upgrades Your Website Needs Now

Five Website Upgrades Your Website Needs Now

Website design has come a long way since I started coding websites. Business owners can now easily design their own or get a decent little site for a fraction of the price it was a few years back.

Easy, however, doesn’t mean it’s designed with sales and conversions in mind, and most of you are missing out big time.

In this episode, Torie Mathis and her cohost Sean talk about the five website upgrades your website is missing that will cost you business, google ranking, and profits.

Recommended Tools:
Kartra https://toriemathis.com/kartra​​​​
WP-Engine https://toriemathis.com/wpengine​​​​
Grammarly https://toriemathis.com/grammarly​​​​

 

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION –

(transcription is auto-generated)

SAF084

Torie: [00:00:00] If you have that on your website and the more you have the better it’s just going to make people connect to your brand so much more.

Yeah. Hey, what’s up. Welcome to the show. I’m your host, Torie Mathis. And I am here with the one and only Sean Mathis, founder of Miles Through Time Automotive Museum. 

Sean: [00:00:26] How’s it going? 

Torie: [00:00:27] Hey, my vice president. Since the beginning of our marketing agency, now we have a lot of people come to us for new websites. Maybe they have a brand new business or an organization, and they’re starting from scratch, brand new website. And a lot of people are looking to upgrade their website from something that they had maybe a long time ago, that is no longer serving them. Or is completely falling apart 

Sean: [00:00:51] or they don’t have access to it anymore because somebody is holding a hostage.

Torie: [00:00:56] Yeah. Holding it hostage. Or how many times do we have it that, Oh, my friend’s cousin, their daughter did it, but now she doesn’t do website design anymore. And so she has all the passwords and now we can’t get into it. And now the domain expired. And so the whole website’s gone. These are the stories that we get a lot for websites.

And we have a new client recently. And I have this conversation so many times over and over again about the fact that if you are going to have a website, like you have to take care of it. And the way that I put it is you wouldn’t get a car and never change the oil or rotate the tires. And that’s what people are doing with their websites.

You have to take care of them. They need a little Lovin. They need a little maintenance and they need to be updated from time to time. If you have a website, even from a couple of years ago, there’s probably some updates that you need to make to your website. 

Sean: [00:01:51] Even some of the early adopters that went out there and got, flash websites and then thought they’re done, they spent all that money and got that fancy flash.

And they haven’t touched it since then.  The odds of their website coming up in any search result is slim to none. 

Torie: [00:02:09] Cause flash doesn’t work anymore. Like it’s outdated phones have never shown it. So like from the beginning, like when people were starting to look at websites on phones, like the whole website would.

Wouldn’t be there that whole entire which is a bummer because the flash was cool and it made things very fancy and things were moving and you could do all these fun things. What’s funny is that I had to design websites in college. However, I only designed them in flash and not that long after flash was gone like that, but that was like, one of my big projects I had to do is pretty funny.

Sean: [00:02:40] And then I remember, when. First started getting some of those smartphones and you’d go to websites. They were still the website and it was tiny and try to find the different tabs, the things to click on you, to expand and do all kinds of stuff. And you can’t have a website that’s how it functions.

Torie: [00:02:58] So a responsive website is by far one of the biggest website upgrades that if you do not have. Absolutely need to have them. And there are multiple reasons for this first is like Sean said, like people aren’t going to hold their phone and try to, navigate on that. They’re not going to try to squeeze into see the text they’re probably going to leave.

Sean: [00:03:20] And the only way they’re going to go to that is if they go to it directly, You search for it on it, you won’t even show up. 

Torie: [00:03:26] That was my second thing. Like Google it, even we get warnings for our sites from Google webmaster search console that says if there’s a problem with the mobile readiness of a website some type of font is too small or buttons aren’t working or whatever it is.

So all the websites that we maintain we. Keep track of them. So that any updates that happen, we make sure that their responsiveness goes on and even ones that are responsive, like they still have problems now, and then it have to be fixed. So first thing is like your website has to be responsive.

And that doesn’t mean that you have two different websites, some junky, little simple website, and your normal website responsive actually means that the website adapts to the different sized devices. So if it’s on a tablet, it actually changes. The size and then it changes again and it moves and it’s just it’s part of the website design.

So you don’t get two different websites. You only have one website. So the first one is user experience. Like you want your people to go on there and be able to the dog has nicely made himself a bit, like what is going on? So you want your people to go on there and be able to actually navigate well on the device.

You want them to be able to fill out forms or whatever you want them to do. You want to be able to call you to contact you? And that’s going to happen best on a responsive website. Second is that Google actually gives people negative like scores for not having a mobile responsive website to the point that you may not show up in search engines.

If your website is one of those old websites. 

Sean: [00:04:56] Yeah, and really there’s enough competition out there for everybody that you’re not going to get shown like that they’re going to have. The thing is responsive is so common now that if you’ve gotten a website within the last few years, you can almost guarantee, hopefully it’s a responsive website, unless somebody did you wrong.

But if you’d have a maintained it, the code in the background of however that functions may not be working properly. And then you may think you’ve got a responsive website, that’s not even working. And now you’re in the same boat as if you didn’t know. 

Torie: [00:05:31] And that’s part of the things that we do with our maintenance with our clients is that when all these different updates happen and new size phones come out and, Apple changes.

All of their, different things is that we’ve got to keep up with that so that our client’s websites are still being shown properly. So that’s one of the things that you gotta make sure that you’re giving the site a little love and checking on these things. And another thing that you have slightly have to have on your website these days is an SSL certificate which helps to encrypt and encode the things that are on the website.

It makes it safe and secure, and Google is going to start not showing websites. In fact, you get lower search results. If you don’t have a secure website, if you don’t have that SSL certificate. So that is something that you absolutely need to add on to your website. Super easy to do. It adds onto your hosting account.

It should cost less than a hundred dollars a year and it’ll make it so that when people go to your website, they don’t get that little warning from Google or from whatever, or from Chrome, from whatever browser you’re using saying that this website may not be secure because people are going to run from that site.

Sean: [00:06:34] Yeah. What it does is it gives you that little lock and the S so T P S.

Torie: [00:06:41] So that way yeah. People know that your site is safe, so that’s something that you absolutely need to have these days. And probably in the next like year or so. If you want your website to come up on search results, definitely have to have that for your website.

Sean: [00:06:53] Right now. It’s highly recommended. Soon it will be required. So you might as well jump on board, 

Torie: [00:06:59] Come on board. Get that for your site. The next thing that you should have on your website, that if you don’t have, you definitely need to get an upgrade is you need to have an email sign up form, preferably several of them on your website so that you can keep in touch and build relationships with your prospects.

Sean has one. It does very well on Miles Through Time, and it is a pop-up. 

Sean: [00:07:21] It’s actually, there’s a pop-up form. And then there is a couple of different options scattered throughout the website for people to then just click and do it that way as well. So it all goes to the same place as far as collecting their email.

But again definitely gives them a lot of opportunities to do it. No, the pop-up is a huge one because it’s in your face. It’s if you care at all, put your email in there and you’ll know more later. 

Torie: [00:07:45] And you said once you actually activated that pop-up you got a lot more signups for the website, right?

Sean: [00:07:50] Absolutely. Cause just in the other episode we were talking about how people can’t find the exit of the museum. It’s the same thing on the website that you think because it’s yours. They’re going to see everything it is that you have to offer, but the reality, they have tunnel vision.

They are looking for something very specific. And if they’re not seeing it, they’re not seeing the other stuff, so the pop-up puts it right there in their face and they can do it or they can close it out. But if all you had was just something on the side that said, sign up for my newsletter and then that’s it.

You’re almost guaranteed to get. Minimal, if not anybody to go and do that. 

Torie: [00:08:26] And you need to offer your prospects, people, your visitors to your website sign up and you need to be able to email them. I was super bummed. I found we were watching some art. TV show.

And there was an artist on there that I thought was super amazing. And so I remembered what her name was and I went and searched her because her art is like exactly what I’m totally into. And I went to her website and she’s, doesn’t really do social media. She has an Instagram page and she’s made like five posts like two, three years ago.

So it can’t really follow her there. I don’t really want to forget about her. There was no email sign up on anything. I’m going to forget what her name is like. And there might be some time that like I wanted to buy something or I want to know more or see like what she’s like. No way for me to keep in touch.

Yeah. So you really need to think about that kind of thing. And so people want to stay in touch with you and maybe now is just not the right time for them to buy. So you have to allow them these opportunities to stay in touch with you. And some people just don’t really want to do it through social media.

Plus social media drowns out so much. You got so much going on.  When you’re competing against. Politics and cat videos. There’s not a lot that people might actually see what you have going on. You have to allow them to connect through email with you. 

Sean: [00:09:42] And one of the easiest ways to get it with that popup, if your business is the type of business that it makes sense, 10% off, a dollar off, whatever the case may be, but give them something in exchange for that email and you’ll get them.

Torie: [00:09:57] So just so you know, you’re exchanging something of value for the email and, with the pop-up you might think that’s very difficult to do. So we use Kartra for our email signup, which makes it super easy that we, set up a form in Kartra, which again, takes a couple of clicks to do.

And then it actually gives us code that we just put on the website in one little spot and then it just pops up. It’s not like it’s difficult to do so maybe five years ago, like it might’ve been hard or. Expensive or you might’ve had to get like a designer or some website developer. That’s not how things are anymore.

Anybody can have a website, a pop-up on the website, no matter what kind of builder or what kind of, how your website is built or, It’s not a problem anymore. There are ways for you to do it super duper simple. And then when people sign up that name and that email address goes right into your email service provider, which again, like I said, we use Kartra and then you can send emails to them directly from there.

And it makes it super easy. 

Sean: [00:10:52] See? And some people might think I don’t want to be intrusive and be annoying, have that pop-up thing. There’s ways like for Miles Through Time, it pops up immediately. Cause that’s, it makes sense for Miles Through Time to be like that. But maybe you’ve got 

a business that you don’t want it to pop up immediately.

So you, you have it so that it, It can actually tell when you’re about to close the tab or the browser or whatever, and then it pops up, Hey, before you go, here’s 10% off or whatever the case may be. So now they were leaving already, but you’re going to be like that one last, do you really want to go because, I got something for you.

And then it’s not intrusive at all. Cause they’re there. They’re going to close it anyways. Like they were going to do, or maybe you got them, that’s a win 

Torie: [00:11:32] wish that artists would have had that I would have signed up. She could have emailed me and I would have bought all kinds of stuff from her.

Sean: [00:11:39] I actually wait for him. If I’m in some sort of online store to buy something, I wait for the pop-up, I try it out, give me that pop-up cause I know there’s going to be some sort of percentage at all. I’m waiting for that before I make an order, 

Torie: [00:11:53] I’ll give you 25% off if it works. And that’s the thing is that.

The reason people do it is because it works. So stop thinking that like it’s intrusive or it’s not nice, or it works, people sign up through pop-ups. 

Sean: [00:12:09] I actually just gave my email to a company that they make these really cool wood phone cases. And I was actually looking for a case for the computer.

They don’t make one for the computer, but I gave him my email and I’ve actually talked to him back and forth on social media. A couple of times being like. Yeah. Any plans to make a Mac book pro case. And they’re like, Oh, none at the moment, but we’ll take it to our team. And who knows what they’re actually going to do with that?

It doesn’t really matter. But I did wind up getting a percentage off that if I wanted to buy a case for the phone. And then they had actually a competition for some other. Cube art type thing. What’s wood and resin and all this kind of stuff. And yeah, I, why not? I did it because if anything, if they do wind up coming out with something that I want in the future, because they’re really cool, we just don’t need.

A phone case right now. But if I didn’t give my email and then they didn’t reach out to me every, so I would completely forget about it.

Torie: [00:13:02] And Sean was like, I’ll get you one of these like there, he was looking for my, my newer computer so that we could have a case on it. I like my phone case right now.

I’m like, I don’t really need to buy one. But when we go to the next phone yes, that is absolutely what I want. So yes, we need to sign up for it. We need to follow them somewhere. Otherwise, what are you going to have? Like a list of things, like when I get a phone case and write it down, like that email is so important.

Sean: [00:13:26] I think that a lot of businesses, they don’t, I think subconsciously they know that not everyone’s ready to buy right now, but they’re so caught up on sell sell. That all they want are their customers to buy right now, when in reality, you gotta stop thinking that way and turn to a nurture.

Like you want to nurture these people until they’re ready to buy, because if they were ever going to be a customer of yours they, you nurturing them will ensure that they do buy from you eventually. But if you don’t nurture them, 

Torie: [00:13:59] don’t give them an opportunity to be nurtured. 

Sean: [00:14:01] They’re gone. Yeah.

And if you’re like the, by now or they’re gone, your pool of customers is shrunk drastically where again, if you’ve nurtured them, that pool of potential customers is massive. You actually have no idea how big it is, because it could take a day, a week, couple of months.

It could take them years before they ever buy from you, especially depending on what your price point is, Realtors, I might, I’m not ready to buy a house right now, but if this realtor has got this brand and I’m like, Oh man, when we are ready, they’re my realtor. They’re going to make. A shit ton of money off of us when we’re ready, but we’re not ready yet.

And it’s not, they’re not losing anything. They’re nurturing us. 

Torie: [00:14:47] Yeah. Building a relationship with your prospects is super important and you’re right. I think people focus on they want the sale right now. But, and I don’t remember exactly what the statistic is, but it’s around seven to 10 touches that somebody needs with a business, with a brand before they will buy anything from them.

And like Sean said the higher ticket, it is, it’s probably more. And so you have a really good opportunity to get a lot more clients and to build that know and trust with more people when you allow them to be nurtured. And it’s generally going to be through email Facebook, or, social media is secondary to that.

I think there’s a place for it. I think it’s super important. Again, you’re going against cat videos and politics right now. And it’s hard to break through all of that stuff. But your email is a little bit more sacred. And so as long as you are giving good information and you’re not necessarily being sell, I know I’ve talked about like the Halloween store that did two emails a day until I finally was like, I got, I have to unsubscribe because I’m not going to buy right now.

No, you don’t. Don’t be that be, once a week. Once every other week I would say once a month is not enough. I think you need to be in touch with them a little bit more. Otherwise they’re going to be like, who the heck is this? Or why am I getting this? Have even continued to build that relationship.

Over time, you’re going to have a lot more people buying from you. 

Sean: [00:16:02] I’m pretty sure no matter what your business is, there’s gotta be something interesting. That’s going on. Semi often, right? Maybe once a week, every couple of weeks, something interesting is happening. That would be interesting enough to let your customers know your potential customers.

Torie: [00:16:21] The thing is it’s that whole blindness though, you got to stop being blind to your business. I had this client that was an author and we rebuild this whole entire, we actually built two websites with them, one for his publishing company and one for his author website. And we were talking about different things to add on there.

And he was talking about social media and what he should be posting and things like that. And so I asked him about what he was doing and he was like, yeah, blah, blah, blah. And I have a book signing coming up. I’m like, you have a book sign that’s awesome. And he’s I do book signings all the time.

Who like, who cares if you do them all the time to people who aren’t like authors that’s cool. Like people want to meet you. People want to hear about that kind of stuff. So he thought it was just like it’s every day. It’s what I do. So you can’t be blind to those kinds of things. You have to share those types of things that other people are going to think are interesting.

Plus you have brand new people coming in. You got to say the same thing over and over again, because you always have somebody new coming in that doesn’t know that stuff. If you’re like, Oh I already told everybody that I do a book signing or I do book signings once a month or whatever, that thing is.

Somebody new coming in. Doesn’t know that. So you gotta say it again. You have to introduce yourself again and tell your story again. Tell your why again, tell, tell those cool little things because people don’t know people are coming in at different times. People don’t remember. Maybe they didn’t read that stuff.

So it’s easy for you to be blind on those types of things. And so maybe you need to ask. Somebody outside of your business, or try to come up with maybe like 10 things that you need to constantly be putting out there. And then if you do an email that goes out to people twice a month, maybe you just grab one of those items.

If you have 10, that gives you five months of things that you’re always making. Sure. So that way you don’t have to come up with a new idea. Cause it’s you’re starting with a blank page. We always say never start with zero. Don’t start with a blank page, start with one of these ideas and then just go off of that.

And it’s one of those things. The more you do the better you get, right? Shaun’s so good at sending emails. You guys like if you sign up for the Miles Through Time newsletter Sean sends emails, Sean emails with pictures, Sean tells the stories, he does the same thing. He does different things.

Tell us about what’s going on, new things, coming in, things going out, things that they need. Sean emails like when he needs something and people come out and help him. If he wouldn’t have asked, nobody would have known he needed help. 

Sean: [00:18:28] It’s actually crazy how much the museum has gotten. Just from the emails I’ve sent out.

And the thing is if I’ll do the same thing on social media, I’ll share something. That’s, we need whatever it is. It almost never comes from that. It always comes from email responses 

Torie: [00:18:49] And you don’t know who’s on that email list. Sean has people from all over the place. People have emailed him and, or have donated money and they’re like, I live in California.

I hope to come out there one day, glad to help you out. It’s amazing. Like you don’t know who’s on your list 

Sean: [00:19:04] Specifically for the museum. I see that I know there’s a lot of people on there that may not ever visit the museum and I’m not gonna poopoo them. I’m not going to be like, Oh, they’re never going to give me $7.

So I want to tell them how things are going. You know what this is what’s new. This is what we’re doing. Keep people excited, say these are the things that we want to do, and here’s how you can help. And th there’s always. Something to say. The only thing that I try to do is I don’t want to send an email every single week.

That is nothing but. We need this. We need this donate this, like that’s, it’s too much. People are going to unsubscribe. And I like it would be annoying to me. I want to know, Hey, this is a car that’s coming in and all that we got car shows coming. There’s all these things. And I might not say anything about donations.

Torie: [00:19:53] You know what, like I’ve talked about Gibbs gardens before, but they send an email once a week, at least. And they give an update on what is blooming. And so they don’t just say, Hey, these azaleas are blooming. They’re like the azaleas are blooming and we have. This mini is azaleas and they’re this kind of this kind.

And then you can click and you can see all these pictures of everything that like, they’re constantly saying what’s going on. What’s and maybe azaleas. Aren’t your thing, maybe roses are your thing. Maybe you’re going to wait until the roses are blooming to come, but if they just assumed, Oh, everybody knows that like roses bloomin’ I dunno when roses bloom, but it’s Assuming that people just know they don’t and they tell all these things and just like the museum you never know what that one thing is. Maybe somebody was waiting for that car to come in. They’re like, Oh my God, my grandpa had that car. I gotta go. You gotta keep putting all that different stuff out there because you don’t know who’s on your email list.

It’s gonna, that they need that, that they want to hear that, that’s going to be the thing that pushes them to the next level, to have them come in, to have them buy from you. 

Sean: [00:20:51] And then stuff like the flowers are like, that keeps them from unsubscribing quick. You’re like, Oh, what are you going to tell me on the next email?

Torie: [00:20:58] And they put beautiful. They go around there, like these pictures were taken on the 23rd and then they have all these pictures of what’s going on there. And so it’s not like they’re like buy Jim’s book, buy the book. And those that’s always mentioned in an email, they have so much content.

That’s interesting. That’s changing. Plus they’re following. The same type of I know what to expect from them. Do you prep people for yours? They probably know, Oh, Sean’s got to change at the museum. So they know that they’re getting an email that saying, Oh, Sean needs something. Sean got a change.

Sean has an event coming up. So they start to know what to expect and they probably look for it. Now I look for, I want to know what’s happening at the garden, even if I can’t go that maybe next year we’ll get to go and catch the azaleas. Cause we’re busy this year and we can’t do it. So they may not have gotten me for the azaleas this year, but now I have it in my mind that a year from now, I want to go that maybe now I’ll renew my annual membership because I missed the azaleas this year and I want to see them.

So now they got me another year because of this email that I sent out, see all that kind of can all connect. So sending out that email super important, but people have to be able to find the sign up form, pop up. Fricking great, absolutely works. People have them because it works. And it’s not like one of those obtrusive, like people pop up blockers and it’s like, it’s just a little pop-up that you can close really easily.

And people do it because it works, and talking about pictures that is another upgrade that you absolutely should have on your website. I don’t care what. Your businesses is pictures because pictures and video and audio and all of these things work to tell your story and make people want to work with you.

Make people want to go visit the museum. And again, like maybe five years ago, this was harder. Maybe it was not easy to get them onto your website. It’s super easy now, like websites are so different than they were before that if you have an older website or if you afraid of adding pictures or whatever, like this is something that you can constantly be doing to adding, to like, to make the user experience better and to have people get more interested in your website.

In another video that we did, we talked about like your website needs to have a main purpose. Sean’s main purpose is to tell people about the museum. And he said the way that he does that is through pictures. Put cool pictures on there. So people want to come and see it. So you need to have those pictures.

You can put videos, you can have, videos from YouTube or whatnot, all these different things that tell your story a little bit more. And not just on a gallery page, put them all over 

Sean: [00:23:20] the gallery, the worst place, because nobody’s going to do that. That’s not really the way the process works.

The homepage is going to have some pictures. If you’ve got something that there’s like pictures to scattered throughout the whole thing. So it visually looks. Appealing. I love to design. Does it turns into you don’t want it to look like just a black and white newspaper that they’re looking at and then hope that they go to the, back in the, I don’t know if they still have them because we haven’t had newspaper in them, but when I was a kid, you got the newspaper.

And then it was only like one page of the comics that were color. And then it wasn’t even all the comics, but that, that, that’s what my eye was drawn to. Was that one. If you put that all throughout the paper, that your website now it’s visually stimulating. And then what happens is the eye is drawn to that picture.

And then it’s what am I looking at? And so they, then they hunt. To see what it is that they’re looking at and you can take them on a visual story of whatever it is you’re selling or want them to do. 

Torie: [00:24:17] Yeah. It definitely helps. We talk about, how do you make people interested?

How do you make people care and pitchers? And especially pictures of people. People like to see pictures of people. There’s like a psychological thing there that people are more drawn to other people’s faces. That’s why a lot of advertisements actually use people’s faces and people’s faces like looking at the camera.

Because people want to see that people are connected to that on a psychological level that if you have that on your website and the more you have the better it’s just going to make people connect to your brand so much more as something that you can update and add to over time. It’s not like you have to have, 500 pictures before you do this to your website.

Like the cool thing about the internet. And I see all the time because I don’t know if you guys think it’s hard, but. It’s changeable. Like you can change it tomorrow. You can add new words, you can change it completely. You can change all the colors. You can add new pictures. It allows you to be super flexible.

So don’t think that, like we were just talking about like, why do people Make these huge changes to their house right before they’re moving out. Like it doesn’t have to be this huge, a remodel. You can just add things here and there. And always constantly the little teeny upgrades, these little teeny things that make it better.

And adding this multimedia type stuff to your website is an upgrade that is going to get you more clients and make people connect to your brand a lot more. That’s so super important. The other thing, and this is something that you can do through multimedia as well is to have testimonials on your website.

I think testimonials and reviews, and depending on what kind of website or what kind of business you have, it might be a little bit more relevant than not, but this is again, something like Sean said, like the gallery page, people might not go to the gallery. So having website reviews or testimonials scattered throughout your website is a really nice thing.

And if you can get somebody to give you a video testimional  like that is even better. And so not only having them on there, but maybe having links to sites like Google, or like Facebook, where you have your reviews and asking people for reviews, I think is, a super great upgrade for your website too.

Sean: [00:26:18] Yeah. Cause what you’re doing is you’re making people comfortable with your business. And the best way to do that is to let them know that other people are comfortable with your business because people follow people, so you’re all you’re doing is you’re presenting them with examples of success.

The, these people like my pizza or this people liked the HVAC install. These people liked the museum, these people like the web designer. And then you’re like, Oh, How can all those people be wrong? That’s, at least you give them a chance. 

Torie: [00:26:48] Social proof is. Super important. And again, it’s that psychology of wanting to go along with people and do things less people don’t want to lose money.

People don’t want to have a bad experience. And so letting them know that Hey, we’ve been helping all these other people and they like us. It’s a way that you can build your brand 

Sean: [00:27:06] and see, and for me too, it’s a reputation thing. If a business cares about their reviews and is wants to show any potential customer, how great they are.

That means they’re also. They care about their reputation, which to me means they don’t want to lose it. So reviews may or may not be real, you never really know unless it takes them to Google or Facebook or something where you can trace it back to somebody specifically. But the fact that they’re there tells me that they care, that if they did me wrong, that, I’m going to go out there and, ruin their reviews, where they care.

They want. Good reviews. They’re actively trying to get good reviews, which means they’re going to do the best they can to hopefully get more so that I leave a good review. That’s that’s super important. I’d rather pay more for something, knowing that they have a reputation that they want me to give them a good review.

Then for the deal, that seems too good to be true, that I don’t know anything about them, that, if they do me bad and I go give a bad review, it’s just piling up with the rest of them. Cause they don’t care,  that’s huge. 

Torie: [00:28:10] So adding testimonials and reviews super important that you can do to at website.

So a couple of other things like I think those are like the big five ones that like you really have to have with your website. And if you don’t have these things on your website or if your website is like more than three to five years old, like you probably need to have a little refresh, maybe like a redesign.

Get things freshened up mobile devices changed so much. And the technology that’s out, it’s not just it works better, but it’s just so much easier. Like I talk about, adding these photos or adding like a pop-up form. Like every year, it just keeps getting easier and easier for people to take their marketing and take their website into their own hands and be able to do these things.

We have lots of clients that don’t want to do that. And so we as a company actually manage that all for them, but. The technology is there that anybody can do it. It’s not just for technical people. You don’t have to know coding. Like even when Sean started working with me it was still a lot of coding based stuff.

And so Sean wasn’t able to really take on a lot of that stuff because it was really difficult and that’s only been several years. And so now Sean not being like coming from a design background or a website building development background or anything like that can do it. We have some older clients that they can do it.

We have non-technical people that can do it. And so by getting your website updated and upgraded, not only is it easier for you? Not only does it make it easier for Google to find you, but it’s going to give a better experience all around for your customers. And if you wanted some other things like great things that you should probably have for your website is maybe adding to your SEO, your search engine optimization and work on that a little bit more.

Cause that can always be a little bit better and things are changing with Google and how Google works. So always a good thing to go back through and. Date a really cool thing that I think is great is click to call and you can make all the phone numbers on your website actual clickable links so that when somebody goes on their phone, they can click it and it goes directly to call them rather than them having to copy it or write it down and then put it into their phone number.

So it makes it super easy again, but the technology that websites are built with it’s, it makes it very easy for that to happen. And if your website doesn’t have a blog, we have quite a few episodes that we’ve talked about, the importance of blog posts and about articles and how important they are and how they can bring in all kinds of new customers to your business.

24 7 without you having to, keep working one blog post will keep working for you and be like a little army out there, getting a new people. Can you think of anything else, Sean, that you think people should have for their website? 

Sean: [00:30:36] Definitely integrate that with your social media. So if you’ve got Business Facebook page. Business-related social media in general on any of them, connect that all to your website so that it, they can discover more about your business, follow you in different platforms. And it’s just a way to connect everything that is your brand. So that however your customers want.

To follow you and find you and learn from you. Like you’re just letting it, make it easy for them really is what it is. And it’s super easy to do all that kind of stuff. 

Torie: [00:31:11] Yeah. And just that artists man, I had to go search for her and then I had to search for her social media. And then I couldn’t sign up for an, any type of email and you’re going to lose people if you don’t have some of these things.

And yeah. And people might not be ready to buy right now, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t  still connect with them and start to figure out what that sales process is. We talk about sales process all the time, figure out how that sales process works so that you can get them in there. Even if they’re not ready right now.

I agree. If you liked this episode, we would appreciate it. If you would share it, maybe you have somebody that needs a website upgrade. And we would super appreciate it. If you would pass this on if you’re not a subscriber to us yet, you can definitely subscribe to us on YouTube or you can subscribe to our podcast.

Our podcast is all over the place, wherever you might listen to podcasts. And of course, follow us on social media. Sean is at Sean Mathis. or Sean T. Mathis or at Miles Through Time, and I am at Tori Mathis or getsmartAF and we hope that we can connect with you and we’ll see you on next one.

You want to get smart tools to build it, go to getsmartaf.com.