With close to 2 billion websites around at present, it has become near impossible to do business without one. A website is essential gaining exposure for your business, attracting new clients and driving sales. However, experts say that a bad website can be worse than no website all – so it is worth investing the time and money to do it right.
Set some goals
First of all, you need to set goals and objectives for your website. What these goals are will depend on the type of business you have and your reasons for building the site. The most common reason that users will open any website is to see what you can do for them. This means that whatever your goals, you want to be clear on communicating this to your future customers.
Make sure that it is immediately obvious to any visitor to your site what you can do for them. What’s more, make it compelling. Rather than simply stating your company’s mission, explain how you fulfil that mission better than your competitors, and why a potential customer should choose you. Making a website without clear goals will cost time and money and bring few, if any, rewards.
Do you have a domain and a host?
It is essential to make sure that your website has the latest security and it is worth investing in up to date HTTPS certificates. These elements are important for SEO, with faster, more secure websites ranked higher by Google. This is especially true since Google’s speed update in July 2019, which showed how important site speed is. To be competitive in terms of SEO and converting visitors into customers, it is critical that your site is truly responsive, is fully functional on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and is very fast. Users these days are increasingly impatient and won’t wait for pages to load, but will more likely click away.
Organize and Design
It is not necessary to hire an expensive web designer to do this for you. There are several quick ways to build your own using drag and drop technology, to choose the right one see this list of the 10 best website builders of 2019.
Speed is also a major consideration when it comes to organizing and designing your website. A good design must be designed in a way that it doesn’t only funnel prospective buyers to make the purchase but also can guide others who are still looking to buy by providing answers to their questions. In this way, you can also obtain contact details for future sails.
The site should also be designed in a way that will bolster transparency and trust. One common mistake is to have an About Us page which does not have the necessary substance to inspire trust. This is particularly important on sites in the ecommerce niche. Your visitors want to know who you are before deciding to do business with you.
Write
Creating fresh content is essential to show that you haven’t joined the ranks of thousands of defunct and outdated websites. Users want to see that your company is active, and having fresh, new content demonstrates this well. A blog, social media feed or both are great ways to showcase recent activities and news, as well as expressing your brand image.
There are fast and significant changes in what content is considered to be trendy but one thing which remains constant is content marketing continues to grow in importance. Modern content should adhere to values of authenticity, transparency, and value marketing, offer content personalization and interactivity and use influencers as an ad hoc content team.
Optimize
One of the biggest trends in SEO at the moment is voice searching and that the numbers of people using voice assistants are growing by the years. Experts believe that by next year (2020) about 50% of all searches will be voice searches. It is important to consider this when looking into an SEO strategy as voice and text searches differ in several ways. When considering this, remember that the typical result to voice search queries is around 29 words – so your site must be suitable for short answers to queries.
Other trends to consider include Google’s move to mobile-first indexing and preparing for blockchain’ s influence to become more far-reaching than just cryptocurrency. Many SEO specialists are also expecting a huge growth in Amazon Search Optimization in the coming year.
Check for errors
Errors on your website can harm your SEO, not to mention irritate your users and generally make you seem unprofessional. It is a good idea to use widely available tools to check on the following: Monitoring and crawling tools to identify technical SEO errors, and checking on missing pages that obviously will damage the user experience. Additionally, links that point to 404 pages throw away their authority, hurting SEO. When checking your site, don’t forget to look for chains or loops, series of redirects where one redirect leads to another, which is another element damaging for both SEO and user experience.
