I’m afraid that once again we’re going to say more on agency websites. You see, we’ve been going through our database and sorting the wheat from the chaff so to speak. Anyway, as part of that process we’ve visited more than 2,500 agency websites in the last week, specifically to find out two things.
- Location
- Telephone number
So, without further ado and to cut straight to the chase, here is a short checklist of things many agency websites need to address.
Ensure that your website can be accessed by going to both the full URL (www.manifest.team for instance) and also the “naked” URL (manifest.team). Now, these URLs may look similar—many would argue they’re as good as identical—but they’re not. In fact, they are completely separate sites, and Google treats them as such. To capture variations in URL formatting, some people set up their site at a handful of similar but different addresses, only to be penalised by search engines for duplicate content. Instead of competing against yourself for page rankings, a much better approach is to set up a 301 permanent redirection from one version of the URL to the other (we redirect all manifest.team traffic to https://www.manifest.team).
DON’T USE FLASH!
On the subject of contact methodologies – HAVE A TELEPHONE NUMBER on your website for people to call you. And make it easy to find and a LANDLINE. Sorry but people are funny and they often prefer to speak to other people rather than filling in forms.
Talking of which, do NOT have a contact form that looks like a GCSE multiple choice examination.
Somewhere on your website include the legal name so that if a client wants to a credit check before engaging with you then they can do so easily. Many may well simply walk away rather than contact you to ask for it if a credit check is needed due to company policy.
Ensure that your address on your agency websites and other contact details (and preferably the whole site!) is searchable text as opposed to pictures. And make sure that you DO use a physical address, if you don’t have one then it looks like you are a one-man band working from the local coffee shop. Which, of course, you may well be; but you may not want to portray this image of course. If you are happy to do so then hey, make a point of it! “Second Table from The Door, Starbucks, Chiswick High Street, London W4” 🙂
If you are going to have a blog on your agency websites then make sure you have plenty to say. We’ll let you into a little secret. We have c. 100 articles on our blog that are deliberately timeless. You may also notice that our blog is not dated. This means that if we are too busy to write new posts for a while then we can simply go to an old post, change the headline very slightly and repost it to the front of the blog so it looks like fresh material. Or just don’t have one – you don’t HAVE to you know!
