by Adam Basheer, on 11-Dec-2021 16:08:00
In today’s digital environment your website is the first point of contact you have with your customers. This means that having an enticing and informative website is one of the most important aspects of your relationship with customers.
Website development is constantly improving, and like the fashion industry, the modern style of websites is constantly evolving. The problem with this is that often websites were either created when the business was first created, which means that the website is currently outdated, or created in a rush and is not as effective as it could be at enticing and informing customers. Therefore, renewing your website is important, and if done correctly, it can be set up to constantly evolve without the need to overhaul it again.
1. USER FRIENDLINESS
In the past traffic on your website was measured in the amount of hits your page received. Having a high amount of hits is great, but what if everyone clicked onto the page and then left before reading the content? This is quite common. According to Tony Haile of Chartbeat* , 55% of web users will spend less than 15 seconds on each site. This proves that it is vital to provide a user-friendly website as people tend to click off websites that are too cluttered or hard to use. Creating an impressive, user-friendly website will increase the amount of time people spend on it, which can increase click-through rate to the rest of your site.
2. GREAT CONTENT
Creating a website with great content is also vital for keeping people on your site longer. People come to your website for a purpose – to find out more information. This means that the content must not only be engaging, but informative to satisfy the visitors needs and to keep them from clicking that dreaded "back" arrow and find information from your competitors. Creating great content is also the aim with the inbound marketing strategy.
3. CALLS TO ACTION
It is no use having great content and a user-friendly design if you don’t have a means for your potential customer to interact with the site. Review the 18 greatest online lead generation tips, to find out in detail how your website can become the most interactive tool in your sales process and provide you with warm and hot leads to follow up. Websites are no longer a static brochure but a chance for your potential customers to start interacting with you. The good thing about having an interactive site is that it works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now that is a hard-working sales person.
4. OPTIMISE FOR MOBILE
Incredible amounts of people are now using tablet or mobile devices to view pages on the internet. Personally, I can think of nothing more annoying than when visiting pages on a mobile device and seeing content that has not been optimised for the smaller screen. Full desktop websites are hard to both see and use which leads to people clicking off your site and onto a competitor. When you renew your website, it is vital to optimise it for both tablet and mobile devices. Google also recognises that most will want to access your site from a mobile device. Thus, if the site is not mobile optimised, you will simply not get the traffic you want.
5. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO) HAS CHANGED
Gaining traffic through organic (non-paid) search engine results is vital to the success of your site. Search engine optimisation is the process of making your website both more reputable and visible on search engines. This will give you a higher ranking when people use search engines – putting you at the top of the page. This is important as most people will only look through the first few links before trying another search term. Being on the first page of search results is therefore hugely beneficial to your business.
Google and other search engines are constantly updating and tweaking how their search engines work, so optimising your website for them can be a difficult task. There are many ways to boost SEO today, compared to the sole use of keywords in the past. Search engines are getting smarter, and they now look at other aspects too such as mobile friendliness, the page's perceived value and even the readability and design of the site.
Nailing the SEO of your website will lead to more traffic through organic searches (free is always better) which will lead to more potential customers visiting your site and learning about your products.
6. CREATE A LATTICEWORK
In the past, websites were designed and built like engineering projects. They took months to create and were then published and forgotten about until there was a drastic overhaul of the site needed. This meant websites were often outdated and not as informative as they possibly could be. Today you want more of lattice framework within your website. This lattice makes it easier to add, delete or update parts of your site whenever you need to. This allows your website to expand and grow as needed. If you ever needed to add a product range or a new service, it will be easy and not a whole new website. This demonstrates that websites today are design for evolving, rather than the set and forget websites of the past.
A hidden benefit of having the lattice structure is that every page on your website is connected to the other pages through links. This structure of your website is another thing that search engines are now looking for, as they believe it makes your website look more credible and reliable.
WHAT IF YOU DON'T WANT TO RE-DEVELOP YOUR SITE?
If you don’t want to completely redevelop your site, then you can still work on great content and calls to action. These two elements alone can provide a new lease of life to your website.
If you need to know how to get leads online or would like advice on your website contact Fit 4 Market. We can give you guidance for generating leads in the sales funnel process and can provide tips and tricks as well as best practices for converting that lead you always wanted.
* http://time.com/12933/what-you-think-you-know-about-the-web-is-wrong
Fit 4 Market are marketing consultants operating in Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth