First Things First: Your Website Needs a Clear Goal
So you may be thinking of redoing and optimizing your current website, or it’s your first website ever! Where ever you are in your website journey, you need a site that will act as your professional online identity and not only be a space to showcase your services and products, but also a money making lead generation machine! It’s one thing to find a web designer that can help you create a pretty site that is professional and written well, but if there is no brand strategy or business goal behind your site, it will be extremely difficult to achieve new leads to your site and therefore, new conversions and sales!
When a new client comes to me looking for a new website, I ask them about their #1 business goal – the main action they want people to take on their site.
Why? You can only evaluate a website against a goal – how effective is it in achieving it? If you don’t have a goal, there is no way to improve the site. You can only improve what you can measure.
Below are 8 crucial factors that you need to consider before you start your side redesign or creation.
1.) Provide an Amazing User Experience
In order to understand why a website isn’t converting as much as you’d like, it’s so important to provide an amazing user experience. (UX) What exactly is UX? Well UX is a term that describes how a user feels when interacting with your site. It’s their experience from the time they land on your site until they leave or purchase your product. You can easily analyze your site’s user experience just by answering these questions:
1.) How do users feel when they navigate my website?
2.) Is my website easy to use?
3.) Is my website portraying a clear idea to users of how my company can help them?
4.) Does my website make it easy to get in contact and request my services?
When you answer these questions, it helps you form a baseline for the type of site and user experience you want to create for your users, based on what your website is built to achieve.
2.) Create a Clear Goal for Your Site
This is the most important! Getting clear on your website goals and the actions you want people to take will help you determine the flow of content and the experience you want people to have on your site. What do your customers need to know before they purchase your product or service? What pages on your website will give them that information? Crafting the content on each page with intention will ensure you reach your website goals and drive business growth.
3.) Bold Headline & Professional Design
It takes about 0.05 seconds for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. People make a snap judgement when they land on your home page, choices for consumers are abundant and bad sites have a low tolerance level. When people land on your site, it’s crucial to have an attention grabbing headline and simple and clean design that helps distinguish contrast between your elements and text. What I mean here is that over crowding content, colours, and images to the point of pure confusion is not the way to go. People are busy and don’t have time to muddle through chaos when they get to your site. Make your customers’ lives easy for them and organize your content in a clear, simple, and easy to use way. You may have design experience and if not, it’s really worth your while to hire a designer here if you have no clue about DIY web design. This is where my passion lies and a designer such as myself comes in to help you organize and simplify your design and content into a clear and user friendly format for your customers.
4.) Optimize Your Images and Use Stunning Brand Visuals
This has a huge effect on your user experience. Having low quality pixelated images that are not optimized and take too long to load will deter your users and slow down your site. No one has time for that!
Maybe all your images are optimized and load fast, but first impressions are so important (and this is where the power of branding comes into place), so if your visuals aren’t consistent and cohesive throughout your site, users will bounce and find a site that is more speedy and visually compelling and consistent. Again, this is where an amazing branding designer will help you tremendously.
5.) Create Compelling Content that is on Brand with Your Business
I can’t stress enough how important your messaging is on your website. The amount of times I have landed on a website and it’s like reading through an instruction manual from the 80’s is just daunting to think about. Your content needs to be condensed for your users so it clearly focuses on their problems and how you can provide the solutions for them in an easily digestible way.
Keep this in mind, instead of focusing on your features, focus on the results and benefits your customers will have after working with you. People don’t want to read through pages of product details when they first land on your site, they want to see the results you can give them first then the details can be provided later. They want to know that you understand what they’re going through and can trust you to help them with the solution they are looking for. If you are struggling here to figure out the right messaging for your business, I highly recommend hiring an amazing copy writer as the the style of your content reflects the tone and voice of your brand and what your business stands for. Not only that, but it can make or break the success of your site and all your marketing materials!
6.) Create a Lead Magnet and Email Marketing List
If you haven’t started an email marketing list, it’s not too late! In fact, now is the best time to get started and when the economy starts to return to normal, you will be ready with a loyal fan base of email subscribers to promote your amazing content and offers to. I have listed email marketing here because your site will be your tool to direct all your new leads to help grow your email list. Unlike social media, email marketing allows you to sell your services and promote your offers and new blog content straight to their inbox. People check their email on average about 15 times per day! And if you provide quality content and offers that help your customers, they are going to want to receive your value packed emails. Email marketing is also a fraction of the cost of paid advertising!
A lead magnet will help you get new emails from people who land on your site. A lead magnet can be anything of value to your audience that you give to them in exchange for their email address. This could be an eBook, a video training series, a PDF workbook, free resources that help your customers save time or provide value to their everyday lives – the options are endless!
7.) Testimonials
If you want to make more sales conversions, you need to provide social proof to your customers that you can deliver on what you say you can to help solve their problem. This is essential to building trust and establishing credibility in the minds of your future customers. When you provide social proof that you have helped other customers with the same problem, customers that land on your site are more likely to purchase your services.
8.) Intentional Blog Writing
Blogging is one of the best things you can do to grow your business online. When you craft strategic blog content that provides solutions and alleviates pain points for your clients, this will help ensure more conversions and bring in more targeted traffic to your site. This also helps you rank higher with google as google loves sites with updated quality content. It’s extremely important here to craft your content towards your niche, this way google sees you as a reliable expert for the searched topic.
Another critical component to blog writing is being consistent, site traffic takes time to increase and your ranking takes time to grow through consistent and relevant content.
Google also loves long-form content so try to make your blog posts at least 1000 words long and before you start, use google keywords planner which is free to do a search on high searched popular keywords related to your topic and industry. The more keywords you have in your content that people are searching in google will help your website rank higher and therefore, gain more traffic to your site.
Setting up your website with an achievable business goal and implementing the above tactics will help boost quality traffic and leads to your site and furthermore, help you rank higher in google search. If you have any questions about where to get started on optimizing your site to achieve your business goals or just want to learn more about our process, book a free discovery call with us here.