Yesterday, my wife and I drove around for an hour in freezing rain looking for a business, and almost turned back. Road conditions were terrible, and we got lost a couple of times (even with our GPS). This business almost lost us as a customer.
Why?
To find out where this business was, I did what most people in the world do today, I looked at their web site. At the bottom of their web site was an address. This turned out to be not so much a physical as mailing address. They had a web page set up for directions which pointed to a non-functioning mapquest page.
Fortunately, my wife got out her smartphone, found the phone number, and got directions. The physical address was two streets away from the address we had.
So here’s our advice:
On your web site, make sure there is a very clear way for customers to do business with you.
This would be my recommendations for this company:
- At the bottom of every web page, I would list mailing and physical addresses and phone number. For this business, mailing address is important.
- On the directions page, write out step by step directions including landmarks from each direction people could be traveling from. Don’t rely on Mapquest or any other 3rd party to do that for you.
- Include a map from Mapquest, Google, or Bing – but check on it regularly to make sure it’s functioning.
- Make sure the physical business address is listed with local search and included in Google maps.
If your business doesn’t have a physical location where customers come, then make it very clear on your web site how people should get in touch with you.
