Whether you are hiring someone to build your voiceover website or you’re doing it yourself, there are some things that should be considered when you’re planning your content. Things that are often missed or deemed unimportant. And these are things that should be reviewed every few months too. I’ve always got a website to-do list.
Here are my top 3 tips to consider when you build or review your own voiceover website.
1. Your website is not for you
One of the key things to remember when you’re planning or updating your voice website content is that your website is not for you. It’s for your visitors. You need to make things easy to find and easy to understand. Presume your visitors know nothing about you or what you do. Help guide visitors through your website. Give them a reason to listen to your demos, click on links and contact you. Explain what they are looking at or listening to.
Key things to think about for every page or section of your website are:
- What are people looking for when they visit your website? What information do they need?
- What problems do visitors have that you can solve?
- What questions will visitors have?
- What do you want them to do when they’re on your site?
Ask yourself questions like; ‘Why would someone read my about page?’. Do they need to know that you were cast as Mary in the school nativity aged 5 and haven’t looked back? Or, are they there to find out what you are like to work with, what your experience and specialisms are? If they want to find out more about you, how do they do that? Contact you? Follow you on social media? And once they’ve read about you, what should they do? If it’s not obvious, chances are they’ll just leave your site. But if you give them the option to contact you, listen to demos or find out more from your blog about how you work , you’re much more likely to keep that person on your website. Which in turn means you’re more likely to get an enquiry.
This type of content also helps with SEO (search engine optimisation) to boost your ranking. So a double win.
2. Your site MUST be mobile and tablet friendly
I’ve said it before (here… 10 ways to improve your voiceover website) and I’ll say it again, ensuring your website is mobile friendly is incredibly important and can make the difference between winning or losing a client. It’s also a key factor for SEO and how search engines rank your site – the better your site works across all devices, the higher ranked your voiceover website will come in search results.
Around 45% of the B Double E website traffic is on mobile devices. Only 2% from tablets and 53% from desktop. That means, when I’m building and updating pages on our site, I always check how things look on a mobile phone as well as desktop. Building for mobile is equally as important as building for desktop.
If you’re not sure what percentage of your site traffic is mobile or desktop, look at your site analytics. Not sure how to do this and want to add analytics to your site? Get in touch.
Checking things work across various devices is an ongoing task and needs to be checked regularly. There is no point spending hours of your time or lots of your hard earned cash building your beautiful voiceover website only to never look at it again. Technology is constantly updating and your website will be updating too. Apps, plugins, widgets, audio players, browsers – they all have updates and they can all impact how your site looks and functions, meaning things could potentially work or not work when they update.
These are a few basic things you can check:
- Does your site load on mobile and desktop (and quickly)?
- Can you see menus and use them on your mobile – easily navigating to other pages?
- Can you quickly and easily find your contact details?
- Can you complete your contact form easily on mobile and desktop?
3. Check your links
One thing I find infuriating when visiting a website is a broken link. A message telling me to ‘click here for more information’ only to find that link goes nowhere. The last few weeks I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to find a builder to repair a hole in our kitchen ceiling (that’s another rather damp story) and I’ve clicked on numerous website links that take me to a ‘please register your domain’ page or tried to email someone for a quote only to find that the email doesn’t work and I can’t contact them. Or their phone number is wrong. ARGH! Simply put, I don’t have time to try and find the link/email/phone number if it’s not working – they’ve lost my potential business.
There are apps that scan your site for broken links. I use Brokenlinkcheck.com but there are others. BE AWARE that this only shows broken links – the links that don’t go anywhere and result in a ‘page cannot be found’ or 404 error. It doesn’t spot links that are going to the wrong page. And it can’t tell if the email address or phone number is incorrect, so always double check these yourself.
A few additional tips
- When you’re checking your website, do it in private browsing (called incognito mode in Google Chrome, or InPrivate in Microsoft Edge). Why? It allows you to see your site as other users see it. None of your admin, passwords or browser history is remembered in this mode, so it is easier to identify any potential issues.
- Always check your website on mobile AND desktop, and tablet too if you have one. It’s the only way to see if it’s working as it should.
- And even better, test your website in more than one browser. Visitors to our site use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Android Webview, UC Browser, Edge and Internet Explorer. It makes sense to check that the site looks and functions the same on each browser.
- View everything as someone who has never met you and knows nothing about what you do. Don’t presume anything. And keep in mind this is how search engines read your site too.
- Make it obvious what you want people to do. Having clear calls to action makes life easier for your visitors. And again helps SEO.
If you’d like some help reviewing your website, or you need some help setting up mobile-friendly layouts, or other web amends I can help. I offer website reviews, where I compile a list of suggestions for your website improvement. I also offer website support and can work on WordPress/Elementor, WIX or Squarespace sites – you can email me to find out more.
Cover photo by Nick Morrison, Unsplash