Your Virtual StorefrontYour Website

PRESENTS

WELCOME

You may not have a brick and mortar retail operation, but if you did, would you:

• Put a great sign on the door so passersby would know what your store was all about? • Stock your store with quality products so your customers would always be glad they took the time to

stop by? • Make sure your store was accessible to anyone who might be interested in your products? • Make sure your store was safe and secure, and lock it up tight at night?

Sure you would.

You need to think the same way about the virtual storefront of your business—your website. It’s the virtual storefront of your business. Your website is the lifeline between you and your customers, both current and future. You should be paying as much attention to it as you would a brick and mortar store—dusting the shelves, rotating your displays, watching what sells and adjusting your strategy accordingly.

So, when was the last time you cleaned up your shop? Is your virtual storefront robust, thriving, up-to-date and ready to welcome visitors or do you need to sweep the sidewalk and freshen up your displays?

Let’s take a look at how to make your website more attractive to human and non-human (Google) shoppers alike. We will build the pillars that will give your virtual storefront a strong foundation and make it welcoming and attractive.

The Five Pillars of a Great Website

OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE

Come on in!open

Please Come AgainCLOSED

In today’s world, everything is built for speed. We expect to have information at our fingertips, and we’re not patient when we feel like it’s taking too long. If a customer is out in the world browsing from door-to-door, and they come across a shop that’s closed, they’ll simply look elsewhere. They won’t stand outside and wait for the store to open. In much the same way, customers landing on your virtual doorstep who don’t get the information they’re looking for right away will simply move on. Basically, if your site isn’t fast enough, you’re losing customers.

Measuring the Performance of Your Website: Key Metrics

Page size * Page requests = Page speed

Page size: Everything you put on your website pages increases the page size, whether it’s photos, videos, words or features.

Page requests: Every single file you put on your website creates a request when someone tries to load your page. If those files aren’t consolidated, it takes more time to load them. (Think of this like having to make multiple trips to the truck because you don’t have a toolbox to carry all the tools you need at once.)

Excessive page size and requests bog down your page speed causing your site to load more slowly than you (and your customers) would like it to.

How can you get optimal performance on your website?

1. Compress your images. Your website is (hopefully!) chock-full of great pictures of beautiful pools you’ve installed. But if those images aren’t properly sized for the internet, they can take forever to load and bog down your entire site’s speed. Generally speaking, most of your images don’t need to be more than 72 dpi.

2. Fix broken links. You can think of links like internal doorways to a retail operation. If a customer is interested enough in the contents of one room that they move through it to see what’s next, but find a locked door, they’ll look elsewhere. Broken links are extremely frustrating to your potential customers. Make sure everything on your site works by regularly testing it.

3. Minify CSS, JS and HTML. What the heck does this mean? Minify means minimize, and all the other acronyms aren’t essential to know (but for the curious, CSS is Cascading Style Sheet; JS is JavaScript, and HTML is Hyper Text Markup Language). However, you just need to ask your web developer to take a look at your site and see if things can be minified. If you’re tech savvy, you may find plugins online that do this for you, but plugins can sometimes have unanticipated effects on other functions on your site, so be wary. And make sure to backup your site before you make any changes yourself.

MOBILE RESPONSIVENESS

Here’s what you should be checking for:

• Is all your content visible or does any of it overlap or run off the screen?

• Can a user “click to call” your business by clicking on the phone number?

• Are your all-important call-to-action buttons big enough that folks who don’t see too well (or just have big fingers) can use them to get in touch with you?

• Does navigating your site require users to “pinch” or “zoom”?

As of 2018, more than half of all website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile devices. Most site templates now have mobile responsiveness built into the code. But if your site is more than five years old, you absolutely need to make sure it’s mobile friendly. Take out your cell phone and pull up your website. And then ask someone who has a different kind of phone than you to do the same. How does it look on various mobile devices?

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO) FRIENDLY

Google is the primary traffic director of the internet. Is it directing traffic to your site? Make sure Google has your virtual street sign in order by doing the following:

1. Make sure your site is properly indexed.

A) There’s nothing worse than throwing a party that no one shows up to. Submitting your site to major search engines for indexing is like sending them an invitation to your party. If Google and the other search engines don’t know your website exists, they’ll never consider attending your “party”, and your website won’t easily be found.

B) Use the Google Search Console to submit a sitemap to Google. The sitemap of your website is the directory that tells Google what your site is all about. This should have been done when your site was first launched. However, if you have recently updated your site, added or changed page names or the overall structure of your site, you should re-submit your sitemap.

C) Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, has Webmaster Tools that allow you to submit your sitemap for indexing. Step-by-step instructions are provided on their website.

2. Edit your search results pages. A) Your search results pages are the welcome mat outside your virtual store. They’re a summary of your site, and they tell prospective visitors what to expect when they come inside.

B) Generally, you can edit the text and links of your search results in your web platform (such as WordPress, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.) anytime you add a page or post.

C) If you have the Yoast SEO Plugin installed on your site, you’ll see boxes where you can change the following:

i. SEO Title: the headline of your search result.

ii. Slug: the page name.

iii. Meta Description: the summary of your page’s content.

w elcome

w elcome

SECURITY

If you walked up to a business, and there was a sign on the door that said, “Enter at your own risk”, you would probably shop elsewhere. Whether your website has an actual online store (e-commerce), or it’s just a showcase for your products, your online customers should feel that your site is secure to interact with and be comfortable submitting a contact form for more information.

1) SSL (Security) certificates: You’ve most likely encountered a website yourself with an expired security certificate. When you land on the page, you get a message saying, “This site may not be secure. Are you sure you want to navigate to this page?” That kind of message could scare off a site visitor, but it’s usually an easy fix.

A) HTTP vs. HTTPS: One easy way to know if your site’s security certificate is up to date is to look at your URL. If there isn’t an “S” at the end of your website’s prefix, your site isn’t covered by a security certificate.

B) Your hosting provider (such as GoDaddy or Network Solutions) can sell you one. However, there are also free certificates available from sites such as Let’s Encrypt.

C) Data encryption: Your security certificate also ensures your site visitors’ data is secure when they submit any forms or orders on your site.

D) Search engines reward secure sites with higher page rankings.

ENTER AT YOUROWN RISK

The content on your page should be:

1. Easy to read, engaging and relevant.

A) Use headings and subheadings to immediately give people the most relevant information about your page.

B) Keep your sentences short. Search engines prefer 20 words or less. Keep your paragraphs short as well. Readability really helps your page ranking.

C) Avoid keyword stuffing. Certainly, you need to tell people what your business is about and put keywords on your website that people search when they are looking for products and services like yours. However, you don’t want to overuse keywords or type them out of context on your pages. Your search engine ranking will suffer.

QUALITY CONTENT

EASY TO READENGAGING &RELEVANTCONTENT

3. Easy to navigate with strong calls-to-action.

A) Choose a layout for your site that makes it easy to find important information like your Contact and Pool Models pages.

B) Be sure your phone number is on every page. Don’t make people hunt for it.

C) Make it easy for people to get more information by creating clearly visible buttons with strong calls-to-action, such as “Get an Estimate” or “Call Now”.

2. Clean looking and uncluttered.

A) White space on a web page is a great choice to make. Readers need a break between content blocks to give their eyes a rest. A clean, uncluttered website also sends a more sophisticated message about your business.

B) A simple color palette. Choose one predominant color and one contrast color for the best effect, and use that contrast color for your calls-to-action. While the search engines don’t care what colors you use, clean, engaging color schemes will increase reader engagement on your site, and the search engines absolutely care about that.

CANNONBALLPOOLS

FINAL THOUGHTS

Your website is your prospective customers’ portal to your business. Make sure your online customers are getting the same service and attention when they visit your virtual storefront as they would if they were standing right in front of you.

Pool building season is just around the corner, so now is a great time to do a little “spring cleaning” and create a warm, welcoming, engaging experience when folks stop by online. Tackle it a little bit at a time (just like you would a mountain of paperwork.) Improving your website’s performance, responsiveness, SEO friendliness, security and quality of content will ultimately improve the aspect of your business that’s most important to you–your bottom line.

The Five Pillars of a Great Website

RESOURCES

HubSpot Website Grader This tool, true to its name, gives your website an actual grade (100% is perfect, but no site is!) It also links to helpful articles to assist you in fixing the issues it has identified.

Yoast SEO PluginThis plugin is enormously helpful for checking the keyword ratio of your site and creating effective SEO titles and meta descriptions.

Google Search ConsoleGoogle’s Search Console is a tool that analyzes and reports on your site’s performance to help you measure your site’s Search traffic and fix any issues that might be negatively affecting your site, like speed or keyword density.

On the Search Console, you’ll also find:

Google Mobile Friendly TestThe Mobile Friendly Test assesses your site’s mobile responsiveness and alerts you to issues you might not notice on one particular device.

Google PageSpeed Insights Google PageSpeed Insights helps you identify what might be slowing your page load speed down.

There are lots of free tools online to help you assess your website and identify places for improvement. Here are the ones we’ve discussed in this guide, plus a few more.

ABOUT THURSDAY POOLSWith over 35 years’ experience in manufacturing fiberglass and composites, Thursday Pools is dedicated to bringing cutting-edge innovations to the pool world. Thursday Pools designs and manufactures fiberglass pool shells that are handcrafted with the highest standards and craftsmanship. Our one-piece, inground fiberglass swimming pool manufacturing facility is based in Fortville, Indiana.

At Thursday Pools we aspire to be the world’s most respected fiberglass pool manufacturer. We believe passion, care and attention to details make the difference.

We are relentlessly dedicated to helping our dealer family succeed on every level, by supplying them with resources such as: product and 360 videos, helpful blogs, dealer sales tools and educational materials like this.

Click below for more information on joining the Thursday Pools dealer family.