Staff Now Website Review

Introduction

Staff Now Ohio reached out to have their website reviewed. This review focuses on the the three largest changes I would make to strengthen their website.

More articles dive into these topics on our blog page. Specifically, you may want to read:

• Write Better Headlines With The Headline Test
• The Anatomy Of A Healthy Website

DISCLAIMER: The point of this article is to be educational. Building a website is difficult. Building a website that meets best practices is incredibly difficult. The intention is to raise awareness and build a better internet, not bring people down.

Want to watch me review this website? Follow along with the YouTube video below!

Let’s dive in.

Your Responsibility Is To Be A Helpful Guide

Your website visitors have a problem and they are on a “journey” to find the best solution. The fact they are on your website is good news for you! That means that they think you may be the solution to their problem. Unfortunately, your website does not specify the next step to take towards their goal. You are not acting as a helpful guide.

But that’s OK because we are going to fix this!

What It Means To Be A Helpful Guide

Since we have helped people just like them before this means we are aware of common questions and pitfalls they may have or run into. You have successfully worked with people just like them and have helped them achieve results they are looking for.

If we know what questions our customers have, and we know what pitfalls to avoid, then we can craft a helpful plan to guide them along the best path to their solution.

Call To Actions: How You Can Become A Guide

Let’s bring this back to how we can apply this to your website.

The first thing we want to do is create a call to action. A call to action is how we can insert ourselves into the story along with the website visitor. We can demonstrate that we have been down this path before, we know the questions they have, and we can help get them where they want to go. We do this by actively guiding them to the next action to take.

To guide your website visitors we need to create an effective call to action. Brainstorm what questions or reservations your customers have had before they have worked with you. Use real questions that you have been asked before as a starting point.

Now select from your brainstorm the number one question/reservation you think your customers. What can you do to help them with this? Turn this into an action they can take!

Let’s look at a few examples.

If you know that your potential customers want to talk to someone, then maybe your call to action is to talk with a staffing expert.

Or maybe you know that before anyone is ready to talk with you they need to see what kind of results you can get for them. Instead your call to action may be to see how we cut employee turnover by over 50%!

How to create really good call to actions is beyond the scope of an article like this but here are a few pointers:

• You can always change your call to action
• The more interesting you are the more compelling your call to action will be

Now that you have a call to action you need to display it all over your website.

Where To Place Call To Actions On Your Website

Hero Section: Your hero section is the main section that users will always land on when they visit your homepage, making it the most consistently viewed section. Priming visitors with your call to action allows you to capitalize on this valuable website real estate.

Header: Your website header is on every page. When you put your main call to action in the header then your visitors will always have a reliable location on the website they can visit to click.

Dedicated Sections: I like to build dedicated call to action sections and put them all around the websites I build. These dedicated sections allow for you to remind visitors that if they are interested in what they are reading what the next step to take is.

Don’t Rely Too Much on Text

The text we put on websites is super important. It communicates our value to potential customers and allows search engines to recommend our pages. The challenge is that website visitors often scan a website first to determine if the page is worth their time, or if they should go back to the search results for an alternative. A research team at Nielsen Norman Group discovered that only around 20% of the words on a given web page will be read (source).

Pages without the balance of strong attention grabbers like headlines and compelling images means that readers are greeted with a wall of text, which may as well be a brick wall with a note stating “NOT WORTH YOUR TIME”.

One important caveat is that I only apply this framing to first impression pages. First impression pages are those core pages to your website that users will visit to learn more about your business. This includes you homepage, about, page, service pages, etc… There are pages that need to be detailed and full of text, for example blog and case study pages.

How To Capture Website Scanners’ Attention

The trick is to break your text up into a nice balance of white space, headlines, images, and detailed text. Here is how you can do that.

Show When You Can: Whenever possible replace text with images or icons. For example, rather than listing every location, highlight the areas you service on a map.

Make Your Point With Headlines: They eye is naturally drawn to headlines, especially when we are in scan mode. If you are not making a strong point with your headlines then you are wasting an opportunity to catch the reader’s attentions. Clearly summarize your point with a compelling headline to entice visitors to read more.

The process of creating a good web design can feel foreign because it is not how we normally craft messages.

Compare this with case study and blog post pages. Here the focus is different. We are educating in details about how and this means the more detail the better.

The More Case Studies The Merrier

I believe that every business should document as much as possible about their work and the results they can produce. Case studies (any sort of formal documentation really) serve as evidence that you are skilled at your job. The fact you have a case study separates you from most small businesses I talk to, great job!

Your current case study is great, but I challenge you to continue this documentation for every client. Best case scenario, you build more and more evidence that you are a strong partner to work with. Worst case scenario, you have details about what you need to improve.

That said, here is how you can make your current case study better.

Place Your Case Study Content On A Dedicated Page

Currently your case study is embedded as a PDF. It is great that you have a case study up, but when we embed it on a page as a PDF then you won’t get any of the SEO benefits. The solution is to reconstruct the PDF as a standalone web page.

Reconstructing the case study PDF as a standalone web page means that search engines like Google will now be able to read your content and rank the page. Above I mentioned that core website pages need to find a balance between visual and text. Case study pages don’t need to follow this advice.

Case study pages are an opportunity for you to dive deep into your process and results. Anyone that is reading this page is interested in the work you do and the more detail you can provide the more confident they will be that you are the best choice.

Conclusion

TLDR

Make sure your website does the following: has a core call to action displayed, finds a better balance between text and visuals, builds case study web pages for improved SEO.

As I mentioned earlier this review is not a comprehensive list into everything that I would change. Nor is it a how-to guide on how to build a website. Instead this should be seen as a starting point for how your can think differently about websites.

If you would like a website review for your own website then click the link below and fill out the form on the next page to request I review your website.