businessbusiness growthMarketingProcess Improvement12 Tips to Build an Effective Business Website

With all the competition online, it is not sufficient to just have a website. These 12 tips will show you how to make your website easy for prospective customers to find and use.

These days, an online presence is vital for any business, even for brick-and-mortar stores that don’t conduct e-commerce.   With the numerous website design tools accessible, creating a website isn’t very challenging. Regardless of the software you select, keep these design principles in mind.

1. Make your site mobile responsive.

A website must be responsive to mobile devices to be successful. More than one-third of American adults complete all of their online shopping through a mobile device, and American adults spend more than five hours per day on their phones. Of course, the mobile website for your company needs to provide a good user experience.

Potential clients may just leave your website in favor of a rival if they arrive there but find it challenging to read or use on a mobile device. This leads us to our next point: a poor mobile user experience lowers your website’s search engine rankings and makes it more challenging for users to locate through a Google search.

2. Make it easy to find.

You need a domain name that either corresponds to the name of your firm or in some way describes what you do. Even more than one domain can direct visitors to the website. To accomplish this, you must implement technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns.

3. Place your contact information above the fold.

If the success of your company hinges on customers being able to reach you or your sales team, make sure that information is prominently displayed.

For visitors to be able to contact the business without having to look for a phone number or address, your contact information should be readily available, preferably at the top of the site.

Include your social media links in the website header or footer, where they are visible, if you utilize social media to engage with your audience.

4. Make it easy to navigate.

Your top-level navigation menu should only contain five clearly identified tabs with relevant pages arranged beneath them. Also, no matter where your viewers land on your page, you should provide a direct path back to the main page. A Google search will frequently direct your reader to a page other than the home page of your website.

5. Keep your pages uncluttered.

Information needs to be contextualized for readers. When a website contains too much information, the mind becomes overloaded and is unable to remember the new knowledge. Use text and pictures in an effective ratio that creates a tidy page.

Eliminating social widgets from your website, such as a Twitter feed, is one method to keep things simple. Michael LaVista, the CEO of Caxy Interactive, suggested that you should consider whether you are adding material that your reader cares about. Remove your widget’s content if it interferes with the page’s goal.

6. Make sure it’s accurate.

It should go without saying that erroneous information, whether it be a wrong number, out-of-date product information, or basic grammatical errors, will turn off customers. You should periodically verify each page, especially after making adjustments elsewhere, in addition to proofreading each page before it goes live.

7. Respect the need for speed.

According to a research by the digital marketing firm Akamai, 88.5% of website visitors will leave a page that loads slowly. Over 70% of online customers now base their selections on how long it takes a webpage to load.

Get a website host that can accommodate your bandwidth needs, maintain your software updated, optimize your videos and graphics for speedy downloads, and make sure your website operates smoothly.

8. Have a call to action.

Every page on your website should persuade the reader to take an action. In other words, you must issue a call to action. These landing pages need to persuade visitors to accomplish anything, like phone your business, join up for a service, buy something, download a whitepaper, or carry out another action that advances your company’s objectives. Offer them an obvious call to action, such as a button, a link, or plain language. If at all feasible, keep it above the fold so that readers won’t have to scroll down to see the call to action.

9. Keep your design simple.

Use of fonts, colors, and GIFs should be kept to a minimum because these elements can draw attention away from the website’s main focus. Moreover, simplicity and bullet points increase the information’s readability and scannability. Ian Lurie, the CEO of the internet marketing firm Portent Inc., advises limiting paragraph length to six lines or less.

When it comes to mobile responsiveness, which plays a significant role in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm, this is extremely crucial. The higher a website is on the search engine results page, the better its ranking (SERP). If a competitor’s website is mobile-friendly but yours isn’t, you can fall in the rankings for your target audience.

10. Get personal.

According to Tom Lounibos, co-founder of SOASTA, e-commerce shops must produce high-quality online experiences in line with the brand perception, much as brick and mortar firms invest substantially in their stores to represent their brand images.

In light of this, your About Us page shouldn’t only contain a dull paragraph describing your business. To provide your customers a more individualized experience, Visible Logic’s president, Emily Brackett, suggests including a decent photo of you or your team.

11. Make sure your website copy is customer oriented.

Visitors to your website are looking for information that will be helpful to them. They visit your blog occasionally to learn something new, and other times they are looking for information about the goods and services you offer. In either case, you need to give your prospects pertinent information that will interest them, benefit them, and increase their confidence in your knowledge.

Try to consider the customer’s perspective when creating the material for your website. What details would be useful to you if you were a potential customer? What level of experience or knowledge do you already possess, and what would you need more clarification on? You may keep visitors on your site longer and increase the likelihood that you’ll forge a long-lasting relationship with them that leads to a sale by focusing on your content from the viewpoint of your target market.

Not a writer? No problem; just outsource it to a professional copywriter.

12. Incorporate SEO best practices.

Even if you have the best website in your field, it won’t help you a bit if no one can find it. Even while you can pay for advertisements to direct customers to your website, attracting free organic search traffic will ultimately be more cost-effective and productive.

People use search engines, particularly Google, to find information online. They typically find what they’re looking for on the first page of search results, so you want your business to show up there. To rank websites for search terms, commonly known as keywords, Google and other search engines utilize their own proprietary algorithms.

Crawling, indexing, and ranking are three techniques used by search engines to decide where your listing will appear. When someone crawls a website, they get at it via links from other websites. Hence, make sure that as many external websites as possible contain links to your website.

Once the crawling bots have located your website, it is indexed, which involves examining its content for keywords, freshness, relevancy, links, and multimedia. A lot of fresh, pertinent content pertaining to the keywords you want to rank for should be present on your website.

The search engines choose the best results for a given search based on ranking. Ranking is determined by authority and relevancy. Add a ton of pertinent content, such as distinct articles on various facets of a given issue. Your site’s size, traffic, and the number of reputable websites that link to it all contribute to its authority. Tools for small-business SEO make it simpler to improve your website.

 

Contact MCDA CCG, Inc today with any questions about website designing for your business!