There are many elements a website needs in order to make it an effective marketing tool for your business. Most business owners don’t want an average site, they want their website to be an industry leader and an important and contributing tool in their company’s growth. Below are the top 10 suggestions to make your website competitive, maximize conversions, and convert traffic into paying customers.
1. A comprehensive home page
When a prospect visits your website, you only have a short time to engage them. Visitors to your home page need to clearly understand your business and the site’s purpose or they will leave immediately. An effective page will convey your company’s product or service benefits clearly and effectively in a quick summary that incorporates calls to action. Your website home page is your one chance to make an awesome first impression.
2. Onsite optimization & marketing
Every business’ website should be working to accomplish its goals. Your site should be fully optimized, with proper keywords, content, meta info, and landing pages – this will convert more prospects into leads and more customers into repeat customers. The internet is more competitive than ever, and you need a comprehensive SEO strategy to stay relevant and rank on search engines.
3. Great content
Content plays a vital roll in your website’s success. No matter what function your site performs in your overall marketing strategy it must present content in a clear and concise way. Effective website content reinforces your brand and brand value; invites conversation and engages users while delivering important messages.
Tip: A good way to check that your content is fulfilling the needs of your visitors is to check each page’s bounce rate. This is a statistic provided by Google Analytics that tells you the number of visitors who have landing on your page and left without taking any further action.
4. Off site marketing
Who cares how great you website is if no one can find it! Off site marketing tactics will increase exposure of your site through link building tactics, social media marketing, press releases, and traditional marketing strategies. Effective off site marketing will drive a steady stream of visitors to your site.
5. Stable functionality
Continually test your site to ensure it is functioning properly, free of errors and broken links, while making sure it loads quickly and uses clean, efficient code. By making sure your website is usable you reduce user frustration and keep the search engine crawlers coming back for fresh content.
6. Reliable hosting
Consistent website uptime is vital to the success of your business. A broken website is the virtual equivalent to a closed storefront. Both cause customers to lose faith in your reliability. Think about the last time a website you were trying to access was down, you probably found another site to complete your task. Your customers will so the same.
7. Provide value to your visitors
A website should offer some type of benefit to visitors. Without it why would a user bother looking at your site, let alone come back for another visit. The value your site offers may come in many forms such as providing educational information, entertainment, resources, or a digital marketplace. To ensure success you need to make your value proposition is clear and concise.
8. A Dependable CMS
CMS stands for content management system, a tool that allows you to easily and efficiently edit your website’s navigation and content. Fresh, relevant content is an important element of an effective website and performing on the search engines. A great CMS such as CitrusWeb will allow you to edit your site’s content, title and meta tags at anytime from any device.
9. Valuable to your team
Your website should be a support tool for your teams’ day-to-day activities. A strong business site will offer sales and marketing support and be easy to update and maintain. Employee-only areas of your site can include everything from virtual time cards and company calendars, to message boards.
10. Quantifiable and measurable results
Your website should use web analytics to measure results and performance. Be sure your website is configured to track valuable statistics about users, conversion rates and other important information.
Website design, strategy, and technology combined with people will set you on the road to success.
Combining as many of these elements as possible, and preferably all of them, will ensure that your website stays competitive while maximizing your conversions and turning visitors into paying customers.
