If you want a website that accurately represents your brand, you need to invest both time and money into the building process. Unquestionably, web design can be overwhelming, especially when you know that the website has a direct impact on your business.
The vast majority of people leave a website in a matter of seconds if it doesn’t catch their attention effectively. That can really harm a website’s rating due to Google’s bounce rate.
Surely you don’t want your website to be lost somewhere behind the first page of the search results. The goal is to attract more people, not to get rid of them, right?
If you want to have a killer website for your business, take a look at some critical features that your website shouldn’t go without. Alternatively, you can look for websites for sale, and that way you can acquire a website and then just make the necessary changes that best suits you.
1.Good Hosting
Not having good hosting can cost you in many ways. A slow site is frustrating, one that fails to load is obnoxious and both could turn off customers. But beyond annoying your users and increasing your bounce rate, poor hosting can also affect your rank in search engines, since many search engine algorithms detect webpage loading speed.
First of all, avoid shared hosting plans as they will make your website slower to load. The user experience is highly dependable on loading speed. If the user instantly encounters problems upon clicking on your website’s address, well, you’ve set yourself up for failure.
2. SEO-friendly structure
If you want to rank high on Google, you need to think about a search-engine-friendly structure when developing your website. Aesthetics matter, there is no doubt about it. However, if Google doesn’t like your website, there will be no one to see how beautiful it is.
Search engine bots should be able to crawl your website easily. If this seems too difficult to understand, you should consult an SEO expert to help you out.
When you have a website that is not SEO-friendly, every marketing campaign you run will amount to fetching water into a leaking bucket.
Hence, if you aren’t so familiar with the best SEO practices, make sure to find someone who is. Have that professional examine your website’s structure, a process known as an SEO audit. Based on the results, you will know whether you only need to tweak a couple of things or revamp your website completely.
3. Use Google Analytics
This invaluable piece of software isn’t an on-site feature, but you can easily add it to your site. Nonetheless, it is crucial as a tool to monitor everything about your website.
Once you add Google Analytics to your website, you will be able to measure the results of individual campaigns in real-time. Additionally, it will allow you to compare the data to previous periods.
With this software, you can see data from all external channels directing traffic to your website, track conversions, and even see how engaged your customers are.
As these metrics are important, it is wise to keep an eye on them. Google Analytics lets you do just that. You are able to monitor the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts, on-site content, user experience, and even device functionality.
All these stats let you know what is working well on the website and what you should try to fix. Essentially, this tool is a vehicle to improve your website and make it the best it can be.
4. A converting landing page
A landing page is a really important page. It is a standalone page, different from your homepage, that serves a single and focused purpose.
In a word, it has the goal of turning a visitor into a customer. So, if you want more conversions, you need to feature a great landing page on your website. Your landing page needs to zero-in on the offer, not the company.
Here are the most crucial elements of a converting landing page:
compelling headline
explanatory sub-headline
converting copy
a relevant and educational image
a short but effective form
descriptive and unique call to action
Although an extension of your brand, the landing page should not be a detailed history of the company. It should give the customer what they came for.
The content on your landing page has to be clear and concise, so free it of distractions. The end-goal is to give the user what they want while also completing the registration process.
Naturally, the forms should be as simple as possible. Lengthy forms are daunting to visitors and make them leave, searching for another website. So, the best approach is breaking the form into a couple of simple steps to make the process as easy as possible.
5. A good opt-in form
Introducing an opt-in form on your website is an effective way to register a prospect’s interest in a product and provide further contact details.
This form is widely used in eCommerce as a powerful marketing tool to get permission to send newsletters and other promotional materials to subscribers.
There are various ways of presenting such forms. You can have them pop up on your product pages, as an element on your homepage, or you can opt for other alternatives. Some businesses even devote a separate landing page just for the form to which the prospects get directed to.
Just remember that such a practice has to be executed within legal boundaries. That is, you can never send unsolicited emails to your recipients. Make sure to abide by the laws concerning data collection. Also, you should, by all means, avoid having your emails land in the spam folder.
Other than that, opt-in forms are great to remind customers about your products, new launches, and everything that can spark an interest and take them back to your business.
Sort things out with subscriber permission, laws and regulations and you will boost your conversion rate in no time.
6. Social Media Integration
Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. YouTube. Pinterest. Google+. LinkedIn. Instagram.There are a lot of social platforms out there, and you should promote your presence on them on your website, because social media is critical part of marketing your business.
Integrating these platforms into your website will help boost your SEO, improve your business’ footprint on the social web and build your following across numerous social platforms. Is it worth it to maintain a presence on so many social platforms? Yes — as long as you actually maintain your content, you’ll keep your brand top-of-mind and keep users engaged. “Social media is not going to leave us anytime soon and its worth the investment in time — it does make a difference.
7. Security
If you’re selling anything online, you need to put some effort into securing your site with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients (i.e. a credit card number, Social Security number), which will allay their fears of providing such information, since there’s so much identity theft on the web.
