Your Website
Your website is important! It is essentially your 24/7 online salesperson - It is an anchor for your brand and imagery, and the way it works is crucial to whether prospects will return, or whether leads will be converted.
In this blog, we've listed a few ways to improve your website to make your business stand-out from the crowd, and keep people coming back for more.
User Experience
If your website has great a user experience, prospects and leads will want to return time and time again.
Is your website difficult to navigate?
Ensure your website is as easy as possible to navigate to ensure users are comfortable coming back time and time again. Users will not want to return to your website if it is difficult to find the information they need.
Is your website mobile friendly, dated, doesn’t reflect your current branding strategy or isn’t converting leads how you hoped, perhaps it’s time to look into a website redesign. We have a blog on this!
User experience is crucial in creating and maintaining a website, since it is essentially your 24/7 online salesperson. Your website is an incredibly powerful tool, and should be treated and maintained as such. Ensure your websites user experience is as smooth as possible, by checking the ease of navigation, mobile accessibility and more mentioned above.
High-Quality Content
“Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts audience decision-making more than any other technique.” – Hubspot, 2021
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing is important to answer your audience's questions, and helps to build trust with prospects, showing your knowledge in your sector.
Develop relationships, generate and convert leads, and educate your prospects.
Create high-quality content to keep your audience's attention – create a positive user experience, encouraging people to keep coming back for more.
Build the audience's trust in your business. Creating valuable content with no expectation of return will build trust, and help your business stand out by becoming an industry leader.
Along with this, your business will become more visible in search engines, thanks to SEO. The more high-quality content you produce, the more it’ll improve your SEO efforts. If you’re focusing on content creation best practices, clustering and content trees, for example, your content can help you rank higher and higher in search engines.
Customer Experience
Creating a remarkable customer experience is important in the growth of your business. A positive customer experience is vital in encouraging customer loyalty, and retention and improving brand promotion.
Hubspot says, “Today, customers have the power, not the sellers”, and we couldn’t agree more.
With the rise of the internet, customers are now searching for their own answers to their questions. They now have a surplus of information at their fingertips. More than ever the inbound marketing methodology is rising in importance – this is why we believe it’s so important to build an amazing experience to encourage people coming back, and want to continue doing business with you.
If you’d like to read more about the customer experience, its importance and how to measure it, Hubspot has a wonderful article on this - What Is Customer Experience? (And Why It's So Important) (hubspot.com)
Following Best Practices Guidelines
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the design of your website and its aesthetics, but are you following best practices and focusing on usability?
Making sure your website is simple, easy to navigate and consistent with your brand is crucial to keeping prospects returning to your site.
Simplicity of your website
Ensure your website is simplistic in design and navigation. Confusing colours, fonts and too many graphics will only turn away prospects.
A select number of colours, highly legible fonts and minimal relevant graphics can make sure your website is usable, helping your users find what they need to.
Keep your menu simple and straight-forward, both within your header and footer of your website. Perhaps a search-bar would be beneficial for your site? Or adding links within your page copy?
Create a wireframe of your website - viewing the webiste map can help visualise the customers experience/UX of your site - how difficult is it to reach a specific page? If your map is looking confusing and inconsistent, perhaps it's time to reconsider the layout of your website.
Responsivity and Consistency
Keeping your website within your brand guidelines and therefore consistent is important for the usability of your site. Ensuring each page is within the same theme and is responsive makes people want to stay on your site.
Keep your website responsive to users, not just on desktop, but mobile responsive too. Having a website built with a flexible website structure can help create a responsive site, resizing content to fit varying dimensions of varying platforms.
It's worth testing your website on various devices, tablet, laptop, mobile, alongside varying browsers such as chrome, firefox and safari. Test opening different pages, clicking different buttons and each element. You're aiming to analyse each element on different devices and browsers, ensuring they all appear as intended.
Make sure your CTA's stand out
CTA's, or Calls To Action, are elements on your webpage that encourage the audience to do something.
Be that click to another page, download an item, purchase a product or more. You want your CTA's to really WOW the users and stand out from the rest of your content.
Using varying colour schemes can help CTAs stand out from the rest of your site, or using surrounding images or eye-catching text can also draw in the users attention.
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