Within five seconds of a visitor landing on your website, can they determine exactly what your business offers? Can users navigate to your business blog if they want to? Is your pricing simple to understand? If you're answering "no" to these questions, it may be time to make some changes to the way you have designed and optimized your business website.
A website won't succeed by excelling in one or two aspects, such as solely content or solely design. It has to have a design that nurtures the user experience and appropriately complements your content. Your website must also clearly communicate what you do, why you do it and who you do it for. It is easy to get caught up with how good your business is but you don't want to fail to address the core concerns your audience has.
Look at these 10 website tips to ensure you're not losing potential customers.
Devise a plan
You can't successfully design a website if you don't have a well thought out plan. In order to ensure your website is effectively meeting the needs of your visitors, make sure it is smooth to use from the moment your visitor arrives until the moment they become a customer. Think about what pages your visitors will view, the content they will read and what offers are appealing for them to convert on. When you understand this, you can design a website that nurtures leads through the sales funnel.
Remove certain verbiage from your website
There are elements of your website that can detract from the message and value you're hoping to convey to your visitors. Complicated animation, content that runs on and stocky images are a few of the elements you should address. Your audience has a short attention span – about 8 seconds – which means you have to make a strong first impression that gets your main points across quickly. You can do this with powerful, yet brief sections of content, concise headers and relevant photographs.
Once you have this done, review it to ensure it does not contain jargon. All that does is make your content less helpful and confuse your audience. By removing unnecessary elements, you will transform your website into an inbound sales machine.
Implement calls-to-action
Do your visitors know what they should do once they land on your site? You have to provide them with some sort of direction. This is the time to use call-to-action buttons that guide users through your site.
Utilize call-to-actions that give your audience materials to educate themselves and solve their issues. Once your business is labeled as one that offers useful content, they will feel comfortable researching your products and services to see if you can help solve their problems.
Use the right images
Think about the type of message you're hoping to show your audience when you select your images. There are a lot of images to choose from, many that don't cost a dime. It’s important to remember that when a website has an image available, that doesn’t automatically make it a good choice when your goal is to evoke trust in your company. Too many businesses plague their website with stocky photos.
If you're unable to use real photographs, there are other techniques you can use to help pick out the best stock photos. Your goal is to bring realism to your brand and make sure the images match who you are and what your content is trying to convey.
Encourage your visitors to scroll on your homepage
If you want to know how to make your brand memorable, go ahead and create a longer homepage. Opt for three to five sections that direct both your new and recurring visitors to the right area of your website to create a smooth user experience. Not sure what the sections should be? Here are a few of the most crucial elements:
- Value proposition
- Intro video
- Product features
- About us
- Success stories
- Testimonials
These are just a sample of the most important homepage elements.
Ensure the landing page does its job
It's quite common for people to be unsure of the landing page definition. The landing page actually refers to a kind of web page that is created solely as a marketing tool. People arrive at a landing page after clicking a link, which often appears in an advertisement. A powerful landing page drives visitors toward conversion by urging them to click through to a desired action, whether it's making an online purchase or subscribing to your business newsletter. Headers, subheaders, images and buttons must represent the page's message in a clear, powerful and effective way.
Optimize your website for mobile
You may already that know 80% of internet users are smartphone owners. It's a necessity to tailor your website to meet the wants and needs of your visitors. Ask yourself, why would someone access my website on mobile? What type of things would they want to see? Does the experience allow them to easily do those things?
Make sure your website isn’t lagging on its mobile optimization and aim to ensure users have a seamless mobile experience from start to finish.
Keep testing
Seeing how far visitors scroll, examining conversion path and seeing where they're clicking are qualities that unveil if your pages are performing in the way you intended.
If you have a lot of pages to sort through, you may find older landing pages may perform well, but contain information that could be outdated. Some pages might need some updates or design changes. Changes such as headers, a few new sentences in copy or button colors can make a world of difference in the performance of the page.
Identify broken links
You may have a few pages or links that are not working, especially if your site is large or has been around for a while. Take your time and check each page on your site to see if you have any broken pages. You may find that pages that used to perform well are improperly linked.
Revise your content to appeal to your persona
There's a dangerous trap many people fall into when writing copy aimed to impress website visitors. The content often focuses on "our" and "we."
Writing something such as, "Our benefits include…" is an example of a common header used throughout business web pages. While this may be a good way to showcase how your business can be helpful and that you and your offerings are great, it won't get the point you hope to get across.
Remove the "we's" and "our's" and replace those words with "you's" and "yours." Prospective customers want you to understand their areas of struggle and want for you to clarify how they could be solved. While this grammatical switch might seem insignificant, it subconsciously alters the way your customers view your business.
Websites are containers for content, and the visitors come for the content, not the container. You must make sure your website is beautiful and makes an emotional or visual impact on the visitors. At the same time, you also must recognize that the success of your website goes far beyond its looks; it is about helping visitors find what they need so they chose to utilize your business.