So you need a website, but nothing too fancy or technical; just a brochure website with slick design to impress your visitors—you know, just the basics.
That’s not a good idea, and you’ll soon know why.
SEE ALSO: Why You Should Be Using PPC Now
Here are 8 reasons why brochure websites are actually bad for your business:
1. Google Doesn’t Like Them
The powers that be expect your website to be regularly updated with unique, quality content that provides real value to the reader. Fail in this regard, and you lose.
And this goes for other search engines as well.
Here’s some advice from our friends at Moz, on how ‘fresh’ your content needs to be to influence search rankings, “Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.”
Brochure websites post no new relevant content, and if you don’t regularly update your website, search bots will have no reason to re-visit and it will then become impossible to improve your page rankings and online visibility.
2. They Will Not Help You Convert Visitors into Leads and Leads into Customers
Your website should be a well-tuned marketing machine, working day and night to convert visitors into leads, and eventually customers. It takes many factors and features coming together in the building of a website to achieve this.
Brochure websites boast none of these conversion features and end up boring visitors away with their lack of customer engagement and static nature.
3. They Are Void of Features and Functionalities
It’s not only your visitors who will be cheated out of an engaging experience when they visit your brochure website—you too get a piece of the pie as well! Brochure websites only allow you to browse the same static, boring pages that your visitors are browsing: Home, About Us, Contact Us, etc
There are next to no features and functionalities for anybody to engage with—even you!
4. They Are not Built with the End User in Mind
People who go for brochure websites are often quick to describe them as “informational websites”…but how true is this assertion, really?
Sure, they "inform" a lot about the business: services, products, contact info, maybe portfolios, but that’s about it.
Nothing beyond these basics.
Brochure websites fail to:
- Engage, educate, be effective, entertain, and encourage action—the 5 E’s of content marketing (See point 2 above).
- Follow the 80/20 content rule (80% helpful to the audience, 20% promotional)
Brochure websites follow the 100/0 rule: 100% promotional content, 0% content that motivates readers to stay on the website.
Because they talk only about you and ignore your visitor, Brochure websites come across as one big sales pitch; and nobody likes being sold to.
5. They Offer No Chance of Measuring Your ROI
With no functionalities and well-thought out conversion features in place such as calls-to-actions, there is no way to measure how well your site is doing it’s actually job which is bringing you more business.
On the other hand, with a brochure website maybe you can make a guess about ROI: it’s most likely zero—without engaging features and other factors geared towards generating leads, visitors find brochure sites very boring.
6. They Have a Single—and Irrelevant—Measure of Success
People going for brochure websites are only interested in impressing visitors with their “eye-popping” design. Not only is this metric practically impossible to measure, it also does very little for your business. Compare that with these metrics that can be realistically associated with professionally designed websites:
- Double organic search traffic in 1 year
- Increase opt-ins to newsletter by 25% in 6 months
- Generate 10 prospect inquiries a month
- Increase conversion rate by 1%
7. They Don’t Scale Well
With a “here and now” mentality going into every aspect of building a brochure website, they are hardly equipped enough to navigate the inevitable future demands and challenges of you are going to face as your needs evolve.
8. They Inevitably Become Obsolete
Without any thought to the future, brochure websites get blown away by the slightest change in your needs or online technology. Before you know it, you need another website because the one you thought you needed was not future-proofed enough.
We would love to chat with you today about creating a converting website that gives you the very best ROI (Return on Investment.)
