Getting your business online and gaining a real presence in the place where your potential customers are searching for your services or products is one of the best things that you can do. Creating a website has become far easier but with well over one billion websites in the world and many of your competitors online too what are you doing to stand out? Ensuring that your website is good, memorable and engaging has never been more important.
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How Good is Your Website?
There are many things that go towards making a website good and also help you to stand out. Some of this will depend on your product or service and who your target market is, however we’ve listed the main areas below to help you:
A Strong and Clear Message
What is the purpose of your site? Is it obvious to your visitors as soon as they arrive at your site? It’s crucial to have a simple and clear message that your visitors can understand. Communicating this on your home page will help you gain leads and sales and also help the search engines categorise your website for the right keywords and phrases ensuring that you are visible in the search results.
Simple Navigation and Clean Website Layout
Good website navigation and a clean website layout are also important features of a good website. People search the web so quickly now that they need to find what they are looking for immediately or they will get frustrated and leave. (You have 8 seconds to make a good impression and have your visitors be able to find what they are looking for). Your website’s navigation is therefore absolutely essential to get right. Clear navigation tabs, well structured pages and organised information will enable your visitors to easily find what they are looking for.
Visually Appealing
Another main priority of a good website is it’s visual appeal. I know when I browse the net for various things that if I land on a website that I deem to be ugly, unless I see straight away what I am looking for, I can guarantee that I won’t even stay on the website for the 8 seconds! A visually appealing website has the added advantage of appearing to be more professional, so be sure that your website design has appeal.
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Great Content
Conveying relevant and useful information to your visitors is the main function of any website. Does your website content provide answers to the questions that your visitors might have? Is it well written and easy to understand? Does it include keywords relevant to your business in your page titles, meta data, headings and page content which not only keeps your content focused but also helps your potential customers find your business online?
Regularly updated and valuable content in the form of a blog will not only entice your visitors to stay longer on your site but will also keep them coming back for more in order to gain as much value from you as possible. This builds trust with customers and by building trust with your customers you are building a relationship with them which makes them more likely to buy from you than a competitor that has no relationship or trust in place. Even if you are more expensive they would sooner shop with you as that all important trust element is there.
Video
Video is a very strong tool that every website should be using, but is often overlooked. A video can be a number of different things, it could be a short, snappy, powerful and informative insight into your business and what you do, or you could use video to go into detail about a specific product or service. (Have you seen our 3 part video course?) Video is something that every business should have as it can help build that stronger relationship that you need to have with your clients.
Database Building
Building that all important database and capturing your website visitor’s email addresses is something you HAVE to be doing. Offering something of value to your visitors in return for their email address will lead to you creating a list of interested people that you are able to build a relationship with. By sending relevant emails that your potential customers will find useful you are then able to build trust and when they are ready to buy they are far more likely to buy from you. There are plenty of things you can do to build your database, and some really fantastic things to do with your database and how you can segment it too.
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Do you need help to make your website good?
These are all things that we can help you with, our step by step guides explain exactly how to set up these elements so that your website is the best that it can be in order to achieve maximum impact and give you a real ROI (Return on investment).
If you want to know more simply give us a call on: 01392 244030 or leave a comment below, we’d love to hear from you.
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