Common Website Mistakes (and How to Fix Them!)

Copier dealers occupy a special place when it comes to digital marketing. Imaging equipment is notoriously complex, yet users demand simplicity. The same is true of marketing materials for print equipment and services.

Some copier dealers place great emphasis on the technical nature of their work. This can be a good strategy for certain customer industries. Other dealers leave the tech-talk for later stages in the buyer’s journey.

Whatever your strategy is, your website and its content need to match.

This is where it’s easy for copier dealers to make mistakes. If you align your marketing messages to your actual value proposition and offerings, you will put yourself in a prime position to optimize marketing by putting digital marketing best practices into effect.

Common Copier Dealer Mistakes Their Websites Share                

There are a few common website mistakes that copier dealers make more often than others.

Many of these are areas where digital marketers may draw on experience from other industries without really understanding how the imaging industry really works. Others are more universal in nature, but remain unusually common copier dealer mistakes nonetheless.

1. Creating Content Without a Goal

Every page of web copy, every blog post, and every image on your site should have a purpose. These purposes may vary – like educating potential customers or following SEO best practices – but they must align with one another within the context of a single overarching brand message.

News snippets and other items of short-form content that don’t address your brand message are distractions. These can play a role in your overall content strategy, but in most cases they do not.

If you create every item of content on your website to serve a specific purpose, you will build a solid point of reference for future customers to enjoy. As they learn more about you through your website, they will become more interested in what you have to offer.

2. Creating Too Much Content About Yourself

Your blog shouldn’t be a vehicle for self-promotion. It’s not a TV commercial. Content marketing best practices define a 90/10 percent split between talking about your customers’ issues and talking about yourself.

That remaining 10% where you talk about yourself usually goes at the very end of the blog post or web page. It’s a call to action that may be the only self-referential sentence in the entire post.

There are exceptions, of course. An important press release or a company-sponsored charity event can be great opportunities for digital self-promotion. These exceptions should follow a similar 90/10 proportion when compared to customer-oriented content.

3. Not Using Images Properly

Imagery is an incredibly important element of any blog or website. Over reliance on stock imagery is a common copier dealer mistake that is easy for customers to notice – most IT websites rely on the same set of Shutterstock images for all of their blog posts!

You can make attractive, high-quality images in minutes using free tools like Canva, which requires no graphic design knowledge to use. You can source beautiful, high-resolution images for free from Unsplash and Pixabay. Add in some light text or a quote and you have a winning image header for every blog post.

4. Forgetting Alt Tags & Meta Descriptions

Before images load, alt tags describes what the user should expect to see. This is useful for users with slow connections, but it’s vital for search engine algorithms that don’t know how to read images with perfect accuracy. Your image captions and alt-text will make a significant difference in your overall SEO success, so be sure every field is occupied with data.

Similarly, every page on your website features meta information – mainly titles and meta descriptions. The meta description is a very important one for search engine results pages because Google displays it right next to your page in its search results. This is the only place you get to speak directly to potential customers before they enter your website. Meta descriptions have zero SEO value in and of themselves. However, they can influence click-through rate, and help to set a user expectation.

5. Slow Page Load Speeds

If your website and its blog posts don’t load quickly, Google will penalize you. Not only that, but more than half of your mobile users will abandon your website if it doesn’t load in less than three seconds.

Copier dealers need to present themselves as being on the cutting edge of technology – you need to have a fast, fully-responsive website that impresses users with its functionalities and features.

6. Not Redirecting Pages

Imagine a user finding your site in a search engine results page or on a referring site, clicking the link, and then seeing a message that says they’ve come to the wrong place. You’ve just lost a potential client that you didn’t have to lose.

Pages get deleted or moved on sites all the time, but they have to be redirected to keep from causing 400 errors. Implementing a 301 Redirect prevents client-side errors from occurring, and allows referring links to stay intact, while still getting a user to a page on your site that isn’t broken.

Invest in Your Copier Dealer Website

Your website is more than a digital billboard advertising your services. It is an entrance into your brand that can either establish a sense of trust in the competence of your team or lead customers to your competitors.

Develop a modern website and fill it with great, meaningful content and your customers will appreciate you more for it.