Is your website boring? This blog post is for you! Whether it’s because you offer a boring service, or a boring range of products, sometimes a website is just plain boring. It doesn’t matter how engrossed you are in your niche or profession; if it doesn’t excite other people, you’re unlikely to persuade them to link to you. Don’t let this get you down: there are plenty of tactics to increase the inbound links, footfall and conversion rate on your boring website.
Funnily enough, it involves getting interesting.
Have an interesting design
Just because your products or services aren’t much fun, doesn’t mean your design can’t be. Use bold colours and bleeding edge web design techniques to stand out from the competition. (The sort of thing you seen on Codrops, which is well worth bookmarking for general creative inspiration!) No matter your niche, if you fall into the “boring” category I’ll bet most of your competitors have sites to match. Desktop only, rarely updated, in a colour palette of corporate blues and greys because of the template they used… you know the sort!
Spend a little extra time and money on your design and you’ll make a site that visitors remember and want to return to. You might even be able to persuade them to share the site on their social media accounts, perhaps with a discount for referring customers. From a link-building point of view, trendy designs and techniques are showcased in blog posts (or even whole blogs) across the web – the likes of A List Apart. Google around, get in touch with the authors, and see if your website can be cited as an example.
Make interesting content
There is always a way to make boring into interesting. If you sell boring products, then what are they used for?
Imagine you sold plumbing parts – very dull. But the act of designing a bathroom is interesting, and lends itself to a linkable blog post. The act of fitting a new kitchen tap is interesting if you need to do this, so how about a visual guide that could be pushed to DIY and home design bloggers? Or if you have the budget, how about a game where you have to fix a household’s faulty plumbing before it floods? The web design company Elated did something similar back in the days when Flash games were all the rage, with a time-waster called Spamwars.
The takeaway here is that all of these suggestions take the core idea of your business and turn it into something more easily shareable and linkable.
Write interesting social media posts
It’s hard enough for interesting companies to get people to look at their social media pages, so you’ll need to work extra hard. Fortunately, with a little creativity it is possible to create engaging content that gets shared around the web.
In the case of the example above, how about running a competition to find the follower with the nicest bathroom, offering an Amazon voucher as a prize? This encourages engagement and could build links from competition forums and sharing sites like MoneySavingExpert.com. Or if you’re a service based company, how about turning each job into an album on Facebook? You could then ask your client to share it in exchange for a discount on future work.
Be an interesting person
The most popular kid in school is the one with the most friends and connections. Likewise, the most popular site in a dull niche is the one that manages to make connections in spite of that.
Write as yourself and not your business on social media channels, and interact on local forums. Seek links from clients, other local businesses, bodies which you or your company is involved with, and so on. Why not join a local guide to approved businesses to gain a high quality link, and a mark of trust which you can feature on your website? The more real-world connections you build (by being a good person and doing a good job, which hopefully you’re already doing!), the more links you can reasonably ask for and hope to gain.
So don’t worry if your business is boring. It just means that if you do things right, it’s easier to stand out from the crowd.
