When presenting the services offered at JRS Mar/Com, clients regularly ask, “Do you do websites?” The resounding answer is YES, we do!

But what does that mean? Many “do” websites. How are ours different? We apply strategy based on who you are and what your business does.

To that end, we build purposeful Arlington Heights websites for businesses throughout Chicagoland and the NW Suburbs.

Determining the Purpose of Your Website

These websites have a variety of purposes depending on our clients’ unique needs. Three that are top of mind are the following:

• Legitimizing presence websites
• Lead generation websites
• E-commerce websites

Legitimizing Presence Website Development

The goal of most websites used as a legitimizing presence is to generate phone calls. With a legitimizing presence website, we serve up content that showcases your expertise. Additionally, you may need to nurture buyers who are at different stages in the buying cycle. For example, if a majority of your budget is spent on outside sales and/or traditional marketing, then it must feature your website prominently and steer traffic to your page.

 JRS Mar/Com developed a legitimizing presence website that made the phone ring for Tennis Priorities Company.

Lead Generator Website Design

If you are interested in most leads coming to you through your online presence then you are interested in a lead generating website. With a lead generating website, we develop a strategy to steer traffic to your site in order to capture name, address, phone & email data. This lead information is then used to expand your marketing efforts.

JRS Mar/Com helped Grand Slam AV and Security to generate customer leads when we designed their site.

E-Commerce Website Development

If you are interested in traffic to your website exclusively for the generation of sales, an e-commerce site is what you need. These online shops allow people to buy items and make payments from the comfort of their computers. Getting people to visit your website and make a purchase is the ultimate goal. Keeping them on your website until the conclusion of their purchase is the challenge we address.

Other Websites and Their Purposes

The types of sites we’ve designed are as diverse as the purposes they serve.

At JRS Mar/Com, we’ve also developed not-for-profit websites [link]. With these sites the purpose is usually to generate volunteers and donations.

Similarly, we’ve designed political sites that host information about campaigns, candidate, and relevant news. Take a look at the Schaumburg Township Republican Organization‘s site.

In addition, the community forum websites we’ve developed help keep community members in the know. Community forums like this can help people with likeminded interests to keep in touch and share ideas.

Intranet websites (internal password protected sites for customers or employees) are also included in the list of websites we’ve designed. Maybe your team needs a private, secure venue for project discussions, information sharing and document storage.

Key Factors for Evaluating Your Website Direction

When developing your purposeful website, we evaluate other key factors that enhance the direction of your website design.

Reaching Website Visitors

We help our clients develop the marketing persona for their website. A persona is a semi-fictional character that represents your ideal customer based on marketing research and real data.

To reach your persona, we’ll want to:

• Identify your ideal website visitors: Differentiate between all visitors and those visitors that help you achieve your objectives.
• Know what you want your visitors to DO: Know what it would take to validate that decision
• Recognize what visitors WANT to do: Identify their perceptions based on questions they ask and resources they’re seeking, then deliver what they need.
• Discern barriers that may PREVENT visitors from achieving your objectives: Discern what may cause hesitation or delay a decision.

Benchmarking the Competition

Without a doubt, you should be monitoring your competition. We’ve often been told, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” We’re also familiar with the phrase, “nothing is new anymore.” If your competition is doing something well, mimic it within your strategy.

Evaluating Current Website

We’ll take a look at what you’re currently doing and how well it’s working. I am going to highlight three steps unique to developing each of the three top-of-mind website types. In fact, the most important step in building any website is evaluating the current state of your site as it relates to your goals.

For example, for a legitimizing presence website, we’ll conduct the following activities:

• Evaluate Content – Ensure your website accurately represents what you do and establishes your expertise and credibility
• Study Traffic – Determine how existing visitors come to your website
• Create an Awareness Strategy – Plan for SEO, create content, increase traditional marketing tactics

By contrast, for a lead generation website, we’ll tackle the following activities:

• Audit Existing Site Structure – Ensure your website achieves your goals and reflects your sales cycle
• Study Traffic – Determine how existing visitors come to your website
• Set strategy – Design and promote plan for achieving information capture

To evaluate an eCommerce website, we’ll focus on the following activities:

• Select Keywords – Discover how visitors find your website and products
• Direct Content Development – Steering people to your website takes more than product photos
• Site Mapping of Traffic Flow – Ensure your website traffic can flow freely from page to product, reflecting the complete sales cycle

Similarly, we evaluate the current status of websites for not-for-profits, community forums, political websites, and intranet websites based on their distinct needs.

Analyzing Data

We’ll analyze data for your website. We’ll be able to see what’s currently working AND what’s not working very well.

We’ll look at the geographic location of your website traffic. For example, are you an Arlington Heights restaurant that is getting local traffic? Or are your website visitors from China, India or Alaska?

Additionally, we can determine the source of your existing website traffic. Are people finding you by your brand name? Keywords? Social media? Or are they coming from your email campaign? If they’re coming from keywords, which keywords are bringing them to your website?

If you’re focusing on new keywords, how effective are they?

What is the flow of traffic through your website? Which website pages are viewed most often?

Additionally, these analytics can provide a baseline to measure future goals.

Conduct SEO Audit

Google controls nearly 93% of search traffic. Are you following Google best practices? Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of implementing best practices to help your website get found by the right visitors.

For example, is your site mobile friendly? [link to updated mobile article] Today, about 57% of U.S. organic search traffic is mobile. Plus, Google has implemented mobile-first indexing.  Having a mobile friendly site is critical in 2019.

Have you followed on-page and technical best practices for SEO? Are you making SEO mistakes? Do you have backlinks? Is your website secure with an SSL (secure sockets layer)? Are you using schema markup when appropriate? Do all of your photos have alt text? Is your site slow? If so, why?

We evaluate all of these factors for SEO and website best practices. These help to ensure that your website is functioning optimally and can get found.

Measure Goals

We set SMART goals to measure your results. These goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-sensitive goals that relate to your website’s purpose.

Here are some sample goals for each of the three website categories we’ve discussed in this article:

• Legitimizing presence website SMART goal: double blog subscribers by December 2020
• Lead generation website SMART goal: increase total leads generated to 600 by June 2020
• Ecommerce website SMART goal: increase traffic to product X by 10% in Q1 2020

Constant changes to how sites are ranked in search engines and in how customers find your website requires monitoring, tweaking, and continual change. Frequently updated, relevant content must be a part of your site. Repeat visitors and high engagement cannot be attained through static sites.

Next Steps

A website is no longer something your neighbor, cousin, or some random stranger should control.

Let us evaluate your existing site and compare it against your digital marketing goals. We can develop strategies using your website to attract and retain clients.