Key steps to improve your website...

Your website should give off a good first impression and attract visitors attention long enough to stay and come back. The more of a chance to increased traffic to your website the better. There are many aspects that come into factor when changing your website around your website. Making sure it is up to date with prices, products, content and images is very important for your customers.

Website Navigation The navigation on your site helps the user find what they’re looking for and helps your search engine rankings.  You could use more descriptive text for navigation instead of generic text like ‘Products and Services’ ‘About’ and ‘Contact’. Use words that your visitors would use and words that your visitors are searching for. It’s fewer clicks for the user and helps search engines show your site. Mission Statement Add a mission statement, to tell the visitor what you do and why you do it. Putting this on your home page, blog or about page will let the visitors know exactly what they will be getting from you and your company. This also encourages the customers to trust you more as your website will look more professional. You should include [Our company] is where [Our audience] gets, [What information] that offers and [What benefit]. Call to Action Text The call to action, or CTA, is very important. If you’ve got your users on the site and they’re interested, the next step is to make them buy. Buttons help for actions, for example, “Get a quote,” “Download,” “Open an account,” “Go to checkout.” The text on the button should begin with a verb. Otherwise, it’s not a call to action, just a button with some text on it. “More information” for example, is not a call to action. Use the 1st person voice (I, me, my) to let the users tell the CTA what to do. Example: ‘Download My Guide’. Testimonial Pages If you have great clients that say great things about you, that is a plus and it should be seen. The best way to do this is to distribute it throughout your site. Case studies or video testimonials you can place them blogs, product pages, about etc. instead of dedicating them to one page. This shows trust and reliability, as visitors can see other visitor’s feedback on the product or website. Team Pages Let the visitor know who’s behind the scenes in your company and what your company is all about. This shows the visitors exactly who they’ll be doing business with. Using individual team pages gives you a chance to rank in search engines when people search for your name specifically. If you have all of your team members on one page, there’s no chance Google will know which person to rank that page for. Mobile-friendly Having a mobile-friendly site is now a must have, when it comes to websites. Google updated their mobile search rankings algorithm and now mobile-friendly web pages will rank higher in mobile search results than non-mobile friendly pages. There’s a reason Google did this, they want the user to have a good experience when they land on your website. If your site has tiny links and is hard to navigate, people are not going to want to stay on your site. Read more about Mobile Optimisation

Internal Linking

(See above) Don’t let your visitors hit a dead end on your site, always keep them moving. On your service pages, you can add a call to action with a link to your contact form. On the home page, you should link to service pages. Include the name of the service page in the link so the user knows what to expect when they click that link. Email sign up forms Your sign up forms should contain the 3 P’s: visually Prominent, offer Proof and Promise something. Make it obvious and clear what they are signing up for. It’s better to have a smaller amount of engaged users who are there because they want to be than a large pool of folks who were baited. These are also a good way of collecting visitors information to tailor your products, services and offers to them. Email Addresses vs. Contact Forms If you’re interested in collecting data, you should be using a contact form. With every form, you should have a unique thank you page. This way you can set up goals in your analytics and track where your conversions are coming from. Another user benefit is knowing that your message was received through an “auto response” email. When you send an email directly, you have no way of knowing if they received your message or not until the person responds. Use the White Space A lot of people complain that on their website there is too much white space and that people think to fill it with advertising more of their services. However, white space is essential to good design. White space makes your content more readable and helps the user to focus on the elements surrounding the text. White space around text and titles increases user attention by 20%. It can also make your website feel open, fresh and modern. The key is to find the balance between what is important to communicate at the top and surround that with some space to highlight the image and/or text. Page Speed One of the most frustrating experiences for users of the web is waiting for a page to load for too long. With the rise of the mobile devices, people are accessing content all over the world on many different platforms. A slow loading page is an interrupting experience for the user even a 2-second delay in load time can result in abandonment rates of up to 87%. Quick Content Short paragraphs or bullet points will help the user to quickly get all the information they want like benefits and key features of a product/service all in a short amount of time. This will make your site be more attractive you can also be creative with this and make it eye catching. There are lots of icons to choose from to promote your content including images as well helps present your point. This also is useful as it will force you to cut down to the most important points you are trying to make without getting caught up in terminology or specifics. With these easy steps, you can make your site more welcoming for visitors to secure traffic and -if you have an e-commerce site- a purchase. You need to find the perfect balance for your website to have a good appearance and have the important information you want to get across. It can be very difficult to try to tailor a website to what you want, the customer wants and what Google and the rankings want. However, `if you can do this and do it right you will have even more visitors to your site. This is what everyone wants, but few succeed due to not taking these factors into consideration.