Why it pays to keep your website up to date

Welcome to the latest version of the Areoff website. Not a great deal has changed under the bonnet but we are now an award winning website design and SEO company. We have also angled our sales message towards our largest sector of clients: insurance and financial websites.We have a portfolio of customers in these sectors selling both niche insurance products such as payment protection insurance, pension annuities, credit card and bank charge claims as well as those selling general insurance and IFA’s. We have also taken a look at how we describe what we do and how we do it. After much deliberation have decided to keep it simple: website design and SEO.

So why does all this matter beyond the point of me going on about what, how, where and who?

As we head into a recession the obvious reaction is to put the website on the back burner to save costs. This could turn out to be a bad move. More and more people are using the internet as their first port of call when looking for insurance and finance products as well as almost all other products and services. Your company online is competing with all those around you in trying to capture the attention of potential customers with your products, prices and service.

One of the easiest ways to loose the attention of visitors is to have a site that is not up to date and doesn’t present your company in the best way possible.I’m not just talking about making sure you have a pretty looking website (although the design and look of your website is highly important). All the bells and whistles are superficially great but pointless if your site is not up to date with your latest and most competitive products. You should also keep your site current with the latest news and unique content (like informative guides) about your company like awards, association membership and other credibility building information. Now is the time for all companies to work harder to generate new business and retain the loyalty of existing customers by communicating about your company on your website in the best way possible.

Insuring against the credit crunch

It seems the credit crunch is certainly here and it’s got more bite than a fresh new apple. So is it time to cut back on spending on your online business? Certainly not. During times of economic uncertainty, selling online can prove to be more cost effective than traditional methods.

There will also be more people shopping around online to see if they can get a deal during this time. So the internet can be a win-win situation for your insurance and finance company. It’s an industry that is ideally suited to marketing and selling online – your products are commodities that are sold mainly on price and features rather than the more tangible aspects of say, clothing or cars.

So what’s best of way of investing your budget wisely when it comes to your online finance or insurance business?

First you need to take care of the essentials. Make sure your website is up to date, works fully in all aspects (that include forms that work properly and don’t produce strange error message), has positive and prominent calls to actions, positive sales messages and both easy and intuitive for your visitors. These are the basics that you need to make sure of in order to ensure the user experience of your visitors is as good as it can be.

Then you need to address other usability features than can make your online business more compelling for users. These can also help cut your costs. Setting up live-chat and call-back forms are an excellent way of interacting with visitors to your website as well as clearly presenting the more traditional forms of contact like telephone and email (yes, this is now ‘traditional’) Such features are often far cheaper to run than call centres and give visitors to your website an added re-assurance that your are friendly, helpful and dedicated to customer service.

And of course our old friend, SEO. If you are relying on paid-search through pay-per-click listing on search engines, you are probably suffering from hyper-inflation. The rapid increase in the cost of clicks for insurance and finance related searches surely eats into the returns you make on a sale derived from this method of advertising. This is where technical and content based SEO comes into play. On a longer-term basis, investing in SEO that will achieve you better results on the non-paid sections of search engines is better value for money, although not the instant hit you get with pay-per-click. However a sensible strategy and a long-term approach often results in better quality traffic for a lower cost per sale than clinging onto the top-positions in paid-search advertising.

At Areoff, we focus on enabling our clients to succeed on the internet in the long-term. We help bring about sustainable and effective results both straight away with good website design but also professional SEO services and consultancy that will enable our clients to see their way through the credit crunch and be poised to exploit the economic upturn which naturally follows.