When you think about it, the whole point of a business website is to get people to actually buy whatever it is that you’re selling. A website is like a cross between a shop window and a first date. You have to draw in your customers and convince them that you’re a worthy business.
Many companies know intuitively what they need to do, but actually making it a practical reality can be difficult. After all, the internet and websites can be highly technical. With that said, there’s plenty that the average business can do to help their website succeed.
Place Conversion Tools Everywhere
One of the main reasons why some websites are poor at converting visitors into sales is because they don’t have clear, eye-catching conversion tools. As a general rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to have conversion tools on every page to allow visitors to easily navigate to the part of the website you want them to go to, whether it’s to download a brochure, make a booking or checkout. Calls to action should be obvious and a different, striking color, from the rest of your website. Include calls to action on your homepage as well as your major product pages.
Create Beautiful Website Code
For a website to work the way that you want it to, it has to have the proper code. If it doesn’t work seamlessly, then users will simply click “back” on their browsers and go to one of your competitor’s sites. This is why getting professional help is so important, according to the web design company. Only professionals, they argue, have access to the tools that businesses want to make their websites efficient across all platforms that users might be using. Having great site code is essential for firms that want to create results-oriented internet sites.
Website Pages Should All Be Optimized For Search
Search visibility is perhaps the greatest hurdle for businesses wanting to access customers on the internet. Thanks to the sheer volume of new websites and pages being created daily, it’s very easy for a business website to get buried, especially if it’s new.
One way to get around this is to optimize every single page on your website for search. Google recently announced a slight change in its search algorithm, reported on http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-panda-update. Instead of ranking entire websites, it’s now moving to ranking pages, based on its assessment of their relevance. For businesses that sell multiple different products across different pages, this is a crucial change. Those pages now have to be optimized for the particular search terms that people would associate with them. For instance, if you have a page dedicated to fragranced soaps, then that page will show up separately in the rankings to your page dedicated to selling lipstick.
Optimizing a page for search is actually a lot easier than people think. The first step is to create highly relevant titles, based on the actual searches that users are entering. Use the Google Keyword Planner to find the most common searches associated with your product, and then find ways to incorporate these into page headings, sometimes referred to as H1, H2, and H3. These headings will then show higher up on Google’s search results.
The next thing to do is to choose a great meta tag for each page. The meta tag is the small piece of text that appears in search results under the main title of the page. The tag itself doesn’t actually appear on the page once the user has clicked. Instead, it’s just a way to tell the search engine - and anybody searching for your company - what’s on the page that they’re about to click on. The more relevant and punch your meta tag, the more likely you are to get clicks.
Write Quality Copy On Every Page
Writing is undergoing something of a renaissance. Not long ago, the only people who needed significant writing skills were journalists, academic and some people at the top of business. Writing skills were one of those things that was nice-to-have, but they weren’t essential. Today, though, practically everybody in business can benefit if they have excellent writing skills, all thanks to the way that Google decides where your website will rank.
It turns out that Google closely monitors things which indicate the quality of your website. One of the metrics it tracks is something called “dwell time” or how long a person stays on a page on your site. If they spend a long time on the page, it’s an indication that that page contains useful information. If they immediately click back out into search results, it suggests that the page is of low quality or isn’t what they are looking for.
One important way to get people to spend longer on your site is to make sure that the writing is top-notch. A well-written article on a topic that is relevant to your target audience helps to keep people engaged with your site for longer and Google will love you for it.
Copy Another Website’s Navigation System
There’s a good chance that there’s a business just like yours with its own website. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s usually best to copy the design and structural elements of that website, like the navigation system. Websites that are difficult to navigate are a massive turn off for potential customers. They may love your company and your product, but if they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll give up. Other businesses in your industry, however, will have already mastered the art of website navigation, and so they’re a resource you can use when designing your own.
Put Contact Details On Every Page
Many small businesses make the mistake of putting contact information only on their contact page. While this might seem to make sense from an organizational perspective, in practice it’s usually pretty ineffective. The reason is that customers are used to being able to find company contact information, no matter what page they’re on. Put your contact details in the header so that they show across all pages on your site.
