Tips for an Effective Business Website
Having a well-designed, fully functional business website is one of the most important elements for any business in today’s digitally driven world. An excellent website is central to your business as it acts as on online hub for everything a customer and potential customer would need to know and/or want from your business.
A website is where you can effectively and succinctly tell your company story, history, share its goals and vision, achievements, your insider knowledge (i.e. blog), host webinars, podcasts, deliver E-Books, etc. It is what will drive your search engine marketing strategy and help your business show up on the search engine results page (SERP).
Of course, this can all only happen if your website is a good one. Throwing together a few poorly developed pages will simply not cut it. For your business website to truly deliver results, there are few fundamental components it must possess. Here are a few tips for creating and maintaining an effective business website.
- Have Clearly Defined Goals & Objectives – One of the most elementary but very important aspects of creating an effective business website, is defining clearly what the goals and objectives are for said website. For example, is your business website merely going to be used as a tool to increase awareness or will it be a lead generating website or a combination of both? Defining this will help drive other key aspects of developing your website, including the site structure, design, etc.
- Mobile Friendly – There is simply no debate anymore – mobile usage has and continues to soar. Almost everyone is walking around with some type of smartphone and mobile device attached to their hands. Which means creating a website today that is not mobile friendly is a sure-fire way to turn customers off and have your website fail. Most people want to be able to access information at any point and if a company’s website is not mobile friendly in these moments when that individual is searching for an immediate answer, this can result in the loss of a potential lead.
- Have Reliable Hosting Platform – No matter how amazing a business website looks and how great the content, it will fail if it’s not hosted on a functional, reliable hosting platform. The difference between a poor hosting platform and a reliable one is your website constantly crashing, being too slow and just having many functional kinks which is likely to frustrate and turn off visitors. Research suggests that 83% of individuals develop a negative reaction to a brand or company whose website is very slow.
- Maintain Fresh and Relevant Content – The saying is true, “Content really is King”. A nice looking website is great but virtually meaningless without amazing content. This includes everything from a consistently updated blog, great quality videos and images, company story (e.g. history, vision, etc.), gated and non-gated content (such as infographics, E-Books, white papers, etc.)
- Own Your Domain – When most people are searching for a business online, they are searching for the company’s name, which is why it’s essential to purchase a domain with your company’s exact name for your business website. This makes it easier for customers and potential customers to one, find you and two, remember your company website address. If your company’s name is a bit long, e.g. Harrison’s Auto Parts & Repair Shop, it is fine to shorten it for your domain address but just make sure it’s memorable and easy enough to remember.
- Have a Promotion Plan for Website – It’s great to have a quality website but it accomplishes little if potential customers don’t know about it. This is why a strategic promotion plan is necessary for promoting your business website and driving traffic to it. This may include establishing various traffic sources for the website content, e.g. linking to blog articles on the business website via social media, using display ads for special promotions that drive individuals to the website when they click and more. It also includes always creating site content with SEO elements in mind, such as, relevant keywords in titles, the right URL’s, etc.
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