1. Make Your Intentions Clear
It’s crucial that your customer can see from the get-go what you’re trying to accomplish with your website. Is it to attract new long-term clients for your company? Push across new products? Maybe get people invested in your newsletters? Perhaps all these reasons. It’s incredibly important that you understand exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with your website so the customer can get right to business.
Visitors will likely find your website confusing and disorganized if they cannot find its primary purpose, It’s vital you keep this in mind. To stop disengagement, ensure you keep your content short and to the point. There’s nothing better than a well-structured and goal-oriented website.
It’s easily achievable and the benefits are rewarding:
- A good structure for your site will give you the SEO fundamentals which will improve the organic searches.
- Logical organisation will help the search engine crawler to index your pages which again will help with the search results.
- Having a good site structure also means a good user experience, as your users will easily find what they are looking for, which brings us to our next point.
2. User Experience – Why is it so Important?
User experience, or UX, is one of the most important factors a visitor will have at the forefront of their mind. Why is it taking so long to load? Why doesn’t it look good on my mobile device? Why is the text so small? Bogged down by slow load times, confusing navigation, visual clutter, or other issues. Just some of the many reasons to send you customers in the opposite direction.
When a customer first visits, they’re instantly looking for a speedy approach to find what they are looking for. Load times and navigation on your website will both affect this. A fast-loading webpage with well thought-organized content and links, both provide an incredibly satisfying user experience. Online store, website shopping cart, product pages, and checkout process – these must all work quickly and work especially well.
People’s standards on the internet in the modern age are high – even slightly small inconveniences are likely to cause visitors and customers to bounce and find another, even if you have a better line-up of products. It’s crucial to create a website that they’ll enjoy interacting with.
3. Make Use Of Your Analytics
A good way of keeping on top of your user base is Google Analytics. If you’re unsure of what Google Analytics is, haven’t installed it to your website, or installed it but never taken a look at your data, then here’s why it will be useful:
- It automatically collects your data – Google Analytics features a function that reduces the work required to put Google Analytics data straight into Google Docs, Sites or Spreadsheets making it easier to understand.
- Helps you understand why visitors are bouncing off your website – Reasons for a high bounce rate could possibly be your website is lacking optimization or perhaps the landing page is not attractive enough for them to sign up. With a detailed report on the bounce rate, you can pinpoint ways and means to reduce bounce rate in the future.
- Understand your demographic, gender, interest, device and location of your audience – This can help optimize your website in accordance with their interests, communication, or help get your website to become more responsive on various devices.
- It’s Free! – Google doesn’t charge you anything for using their analytics. You don’t have to pay anything at all. So it would be silly not to use it… Right?
You don’t have to just stop there, you can go beyond solely installing Google Analytics on your site. You need information on demographics, goal completions, and even more. Other alternatives could be: HubSpot, Mixpanel, and Woopra, just to name a few. Also remember you can use your social media to explore who’s getting involved in your work.
4. Quality Content – Is It Really Necessary?
The quality of content is crucial. Of course it’s necessary. When making a successful website, you need to retain visitors and fight to the top as a high rank result on popular search engines. Alright, the website design is important in putting across a good first impression to any visitors, but it’s most certainly the content within the website that will draw them back, again and again.
The most popular search engines such as Google, are very competitive when it comes to content for a website. If the content of your website is poor, then it’s the simple case that you will not rank highly within the search results. Google’s search engine isn’t able to see what your website appears like, so it all depends on the content and whether it’s able to sustain a high user base and steady flow of visitors.
Okay, so you can put together some fairly average writing, but to really stand out, you’ll need your website content to have some value on your pages, besides some key search terms. We say “Value”, meaning the huge part it plays to increase a website’s popularity and the potential ranking in search results.
The website must produce insightful, informative content if it is able to compete with a site that produces content for the sake of it. The difference will be incredibly noticeable, especially to your viewers. When it comes to producing your content, it shouldn’t be an exercise in filling up a page for the sake of it. You should instead be looking into how you can be adding value to your site in the present.
5. The Use And Knowledge Of SEO
To put it simply, you’ll need to know how the search engines crawl and index your content to ensure your website gets optimized to its maximum potential. There are plenty of different ways out there to make this an “easier task”, done through plugins and semantic coding. But you’ll need the basic knowledge of SEO to help you understand how it works first.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is simply the term meant for increasing the amount and different demographics of traffic into your site through search engine results. The search engine has a crawler that solely goes out to gather information from as much content as it can be presented from the internet. The crawler comes back to the search engine to build an index. The index is then processed through a particular algorithm that tries to match all that data with a query that has been presented.
SEO has a lot of technical aspects, but at the very minimum you can ensure your content is indexed and you are producing all of the elements on your site so that it represents what your content is precisely about, then you’ll find that you can gain an increase in positive results.
It has to be said that making many of these changes is possibly a difficult task without extensive technical in-depth knowledge, but having a trusty site builder can really help you. Website builders give you an easy way to change all elements of a page such as titles and tags, as well as help with handling some of the other more difficult work that could be in store for you.
Conclusion
Most of the points in this blog are just a few of an extensive topic that can be talked about for hours or even days. But to put out a few and briefly explain why these are so important will help anyone with their journey on the online world to success. It’s important to keep in mind everything we spoke about, but to not stop there and continue your learning on making your website successful.