12 Tips for Building an Effective Business Website
Having a website for your business isn’t enough. You need to have one that stands out, is easy to navigate, easy to find, and fast. These 12 pointers will show you how to make it simple for potential clients to find and use your website.
Make your website mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, and well-organized with lots of white space by following good web design principles.
Concentrate on customer-driven content and examine it on a regular basis to guarantee that it is correct and error-free.
With a custom domain and good search engine optimization, you can make your website easier to find for potential clients (SEO). This post is for business owners who wish to make their websites more effective in informing and selling to online prospects.
These days, even non-e-commerce brick-and-mortar stores are required to have an online presence. While there are a number of DIY options available, you may choose to leave it to the professionals. Website designers understand what it takes to make your site look and function properly. As is the case with many DIY projects, just because you think you can do something doesn’t mean you should or that it will end out well. Keep these design concepts in mind while you choose your program.
1. Make your website mobile-friendly.
For a website to be effective, it must be mobile responsive. Every day, Americans spend more than five hours on their phones, and more than a third of them conduct all of their shopping online using a mobile device. Your company’s mobile website, of course, must provide a great user experience.
If potential clients arrive at your site on a mobile device and find it difficult to read or navigate, they may just abandon you in favor of competition. Furthermore, a poor mobile user experience has an impact on your website’s search engine rankings, making it more difficult for users to locate through a Google search – which leads us to our following issue.
2. Make it simple to locate.
You’ll need a domain name that either fits the name of your organization or describes it in some way. It’s even possible to have many domains pointing to the same website. To generate visitors to your website, you’ll need to use technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns.
3. Make sure that your contact information is visible above the fold.
If your firm relies on customers being able to contact you or your sales staff, make sure that information is easily accessible.
Visitors should not have to look around for a phone number or address if they wish to contact the company. Your contact information should be accessible, preferably at the top of the homepage.
If you utilize social media to communicate with customers, include links to your social media accounts in the website’s header or footer.
4. Make it simple to use.
Limit your top-level navigation menu to five tabs with clear labels, with related pages structured beneath them. No matter where your viewers land, you should provide a clear path back to the homepage. A Google search will almost always direct your reader to a page on your website other than the homepage.
5. Make sure your pages aren’t cluttered.
Readers must be able to place material in its proper perspective. When a website contains too much information, the mind becomes overburdened and unable to retain fresh knowledge. Make sure there’s a decent balance of text and graphics on the page to keep it looking tidy.
One method to keep things simple is to remove social widgets from your site, such as a Twitter feed. Consider whether you’re including material that your reader is interested in. Remove any widget material that does not support the page’s goal.
6. Double-check that it’s correct.
Consumers will be turned off by erroneous information, whether it’s a wrong phone number, obsolete product information, or basic grammatical errors. You should not only review each page before publishing it but also check it on a regular basis, especially after making changes elsewhere.
7. Get down to business.
E-commerce shops must provide 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.
To that end, your company’s About Us page should not be a dry block of text. To personalize the experience for your customers, we recommend uploading a good photo of yourself or your company.
8. Include a call to action in your message.
Every page on your website should urge visitors to take action. In other words, you must issue a call to action to them. These landing pages should entice visitors to call your organization, sign up for a service, buy a product, download a whitepaper, or do something else that will help you achieve your business objectives. Give them a visible call to action, such as a button, a link, or unambiguous language. If at all feasible, keep it above the fold so that readers don’t have to scroll to discover the call to action.
9. Keep it simple with your design.
Limit the usage of distracting typefaces, colors, and GIFs, which can draw the viewer’s attention away from the website’s main focus. The content is also more scannable and likely to be read if it is presented in short paragraphs and bullet points. A decent rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs under six lines long.
This is especially true when it comes to mobile responsiveness, which is a crucial element in Google’s algorithm for ranking websites. The higher a website’s rating on the search engine results page (SERP), the better (SERP). If a competitor’s website is mobile-friendly but yours isn’t, you may be pushed down in search results for your clients.
10. Recognize the importance of speed.
According to studies, 88.5 percent of web visitors will abandon a website if it takes too long to load. Furthermore, nearly 70% of online customers say that the time it takes for a webpage to load influences their purchasing decisions.
Ensure you have a hosting company that can handle the bandwidth your website will demand. This is important as it will directly affect the function of your site. Also, use videos and graphics where needed that are optimized. Keep your website up to date, including the various plugins and components.
11. Make sure the material on your website is focused on the customer.
Visitors to your website are looking for information that will benefit them. They come for instructive stuff on your blog at times, and they come to research the items and services you sell at other times. In any case, you should provide relevant material that will engage your prospects, provide them with something of value, and increase their confidence in your knowledge.
When creating content for your website, attempt to think about it from the perspective of your customers. What information would be useful to you if you were a potential customer? What level of knowledge or expertise do you already have, and what do you need to know more about? By focusing on your material from the customer’s point of view, you can keep them on your site longer and increase your chances of establishing a long-term relationship with them that leads to a sale.
You’re not a writer? No issue; simply hire a professional copywriter or freelancer to do it for you.
12. Make use of SEO best practices.
Even if you have the best website in your field, it won’t help you if people can’t find it. While you can pay for ads to attract traffic to your website, bringing free organic search traffic to your site is more cost-effective and productive in the long term.
People use search engines, particularly Google, to find information on the internet. They usually find what they’re looking for on the first page of search results, so you want your business to show up there. Google and other search engines utilize proprietary algorithms to rank websites based on search terms, commonly known as keywords.
Crawling, indexing and ranking are the three methods used by search engines to determine where your item appears. They find your site using links from other sites, which is known as crawling. As a result, make sure your site’s links displayed on as many external websites as possible.
After the crawling bots find your site, it is indexed, which means it is examined for information like keywords, freshness, relevancy, links, and multimedia. Make sure your site offers a lot of fresh, relevant material that relates to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
SEO for Businesses
Finally, ranking is the process through which search engines evaluate which results are the most relevant for a particular query. Relevance and authority are used to rank the sites. Include a lot of useful content, such as individual articles covering many facets of a topic. The size of your site, its traffic, and how many other well-respected sites connect to yours all contribute to its authority. SEO tools for small businesses make it easy to optimize your website.