by Lina Martinez
For many businesses, the first thing that consumers see is the website. This needs to grab their attention in the first few seconds or they will not stop to look any closer. It is crucial that everything possible is done to drive traffic to the site, and then to keep viewers interested enough to spend time there. This can be a lot of work to achieve and possibly too much for one person unless it is their dedicated job. However, there are some tasks that are more important than others to help a business achieve this goal.
Speed
Research has shown that this is a direct relation to how quickly your website loads and how many viewers convert to customers. Consumers expect pages to load instantly, and if your site takes more than a couple of seconds you will lose the viewers.
According to Google, the average mobile site takes 22 seconds to load but most Internet users will leave after just 3 seconds. It is technology that has produced this impatience, and now you need to use technology to ensure that your site loads very quickly. It is not just that the viewers will move on, but the search engines take the loading speed into account for your place in their rankings.
Content
Web design is extremely important, including how your content is placed and accessed. The videos, images or blogs all need to be relevant and easily accessible. Having fresh and interesting content helps a great deal, but you should also refresh old content so that it does not become out of date and incorrect in its information.
Sharing content on social media is a great way to increase the traffic to your website.
Mobile-First
Your business website should be responsive to all devices, but in early 2018 Google changed the way they decide on the rankings. Now they use your mobile version to rank your website so having a mobile user-friendly site is more important than ever. You should still make certain that it does not matter if viewers are looking at a mobile or desktop screen to get a good impression of your site, but be more aware that it is the numbers that access it on mobiles that count.
It helps if you keep your meta descriptions short so they are easily read on a cell, and do not use pop-ups that will cover the whole screen and make it impossible for them to move to other parts of your site.
User Experience
Where consumers are concerned, the user experience is vitally important if you want them to become customers. Is your web design and brand good enough to make customers want to buy? Is your site easy to navigate and to use? Does it make your business look reliable and trustworthy? These are just some of the questions you need to be asking yourself about your website. If the answer is no, then you need to make changes sooner rather than later if you want your business to grow.