These days, an online presence is essential for any business, even a brick-and-mortar store with no e-commerce whatsoever. Creating a website isn't particularly difficult with the various website building tools available. However, to maximize traffic and engagement, it's important to develop your website properly; otherwise, you might miss out on key opportunities to engage your audience. These tips will help you improve your website for better results, from reaching your target audience to driving conversions.
Tips for building a business website
1. Make your site mobile-friendly.
Mobile responsiveness is essential for an effective website. U.S. adults spend more than five hours each day on their mobile phones, and more than a third do all of their online shopping on a mobile device. It goes without saying that your company's mobile website needs to provide a positive user experience.
Potential customers may visit your site, but if it's difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may abandon it for a competitor. What's more, a poor mobile user experience can hurt your site's search engine rankings, making it harder for users to find you in Google searches. Which brings us to our next point.
2. Make it discoverable.
Your domain name should match your company name or represent what you do in some way. You can also have multiple domains pointing to your website. This means you'll need to incorporate technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your website.
Consider outsourcing your web development, branding, SEO, and content marketing to experts who can provide advice and guidance on creating your website and landing pages.
3. Place your contact information at the top.
If your business relies on people being able to contact you or call your sales team, put that information somewhere where people can easily find it.
“Contact information should be displayed, ideally at the top of your homepage, so visitors don't have to hunt for a phone number or address when they want to contact your business,” says David Brown, former CEO of Web.com.
If you use social media to connect with your customers, place your social links in an easy-to-find location in the header or footer of your website.
4. Make navigation easy.
Dan Veltri, co-founder and chief product officer at Weebly, recommends limiting your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs, with related pages organized under them: You should also give readers a clear way to get back to your homepage, no matter where they go; Google searches often take readers to pages on your website other than your homepage.
Did you know? Because users scan web pages from top to bottom and left to right, place your navigation menu where most users are likely to find it – at the top of the page. Placing drop-down menus under each top-level category keeps your navigation organized and clutter-free.
5. Organize your pages.
Readers need to be able to understand information in context, says Paul Bolles, associate professor of strategic communication at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication. If your site has too much information, your mind will become overwhelmed and you won't be able to remember new information. Make sure your pages are clean and use a good balance of text and graphics.
One way to keep it simple is to remove social widgets from your site, such as feeds for social platform X. Ask yourself if you're adding information that your readers will be interested in, advises Michael LaVista, CEO of Caxy Interactive. If the widget content doesn't fit the purpose of the page, remove it.
6. Verify accuracy.
It goes without saying that inaccurate information, like incorrect numbers, outdated product information, or simple grammatical errors, will turn off consumers. In addition to proofreading each page before publishing, you should also check each page regularly, especially after making updates elsewhere.
7. Respect the need for speed.
According to a study by digital marketing company Akamai, 88.5% of web users will abandon a website if it loads too slowly. Additionally, the time it takes for a web page to load influences the purchasing decisions of approximately 70% of online shoppers.
Keeping your software up to date, optimizing your videos and images for faster downloads, and using a website host that can accommodate your bandwidth demands will ensure your website runs smoothly.
8. Have a call to action.
Every page on your website should encourage your reader to do something; that is, it should give them a call to action. These landing pages encourage users to take a specific action, such as calling your company, signing up for your services, buying your product, downloading a whitepaper, or doing something else that helps your business goals. Make a prominent call to action with a button, link, or clear language. If possible, place it at the top of the page so that readers don't have to scroll before finding your call to action.
9. Keep the design simple.
Limit your use of fonts, colors, and GIFs, as these can distract and draw the eye away from the focus of your webpage. Also, short paragraphs and bullet points make information more scannable and more likely to be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of internet marketing company Portent Inc., recommends keeping paragraphs to less than six lines.
This is especially important when it comes to mobile-friendliness, which is a key factor in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm. The higher a website ranks, the higher it will appear in search engine results pages (SERPs). If your competitors are mobile-friendly and your website is not, you may be pushed lower in customer search results.
10. Make it personal.
“Just as brick-and-mortar businesses invest heavily in their storefronts to represent their brand, e-commerce retailers need to create high-quality online experiences that align with their brand,” said SOASTA co-founder Tom Rounibos.
That's why your About Us page shouldn't be a dry string of text about your company. Emily Brackett, president of design and branding firm Visible Logic, recommends including a great photo of yourself or your team to personalize the customer's experience.
11. Make sure your website copy is customer-centric.
Potential customers come to your website to find information that will be useful to them. They might come for educational content on your blog, or they might come to learn about a product or service you sell. Either way, you need to present relevant information that will interest your prospects, provide them with value, and build trust in your expertise.
When planning your website content, try to think from your customer's perspective. If you were a potential customer, what information would be useful to you? What level of knowledge or expertise do you already have? And what do you need to explain in more detail? Focusing your content from the customer's perspective will keep them on your site longer, increasing the likelihood of building a long-term relationship that leads to a sale.
Not a writer? No problem, outsource it to a professional copywriter.
12. Incorporate SEO best practices.
Having the best website in your industry is useless if people can't find it. While you can spend money on advertising to drive potential customers to your website, in the long run it's more cost-effective and effective to drive free organic search traffic to your site.
When people look for information online, they turn to search engines, especially Google. People usually find what they're looking for on the first page of search results, so you want your business to appear there. Google and other search engines have their own algorithms that they use to rank sites based on search terms (also called keywords).
Search engines decide where your listing appears in three ways: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Crawling means finding your site through links from other sites, so make sure as many external websites as possible link to your site.
Once your site is discovered by crawl bots, it is indexed, which means that its content is analyzed for keywords, freshness, relevance, links, multimedia, etc. Make sure your site contains enough new and relevant content related to the keywords you want to rank for.
Finally, ranking is how search engines determine the best results for a particular search. Ranking is based on relevance and authority. Include lots of relevant content, such as separate articles on different aspects of a particular topic. Authority is determined by the size of your site, traffic, and how many other reputable sites link to it. Small business SEO tools make it easy to optimize your site.
