A company website is a vital part of its success.
That is because a website acts as though it were a digital shop window. The landing page is built to entice its visitors and to get them to stay as long as possible, with the aim of getting them to fulfill one of your objectives.
If your website is not designed sufficiently, then it is less likely that your visitors will fulfill one of your aims. Over time, even the best websites need to be reviewed and upgraded. The new functionality comes along, new designs, new images, and content need updating too. If you are not giving your website the time and devotion it needs to compete with your competition, then you are going to start falling behind.
Ultimately this could mean you go out of business. A website is a pivotal piece of your marketing campaigns. It is the thing that all your marketing material points towards. So, it needs to look at the part and act the part. Meaning it needs to suck a person in and get them to do something. To do this, you need to be on the ball. Sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board and completely revamp your website. To help you out, here are a few ways you can upgrade your company website to make it more appealing to your customers, tempting them to make a sale.
Know Your Customer
If you want to create a website that connects with your customer, then you need to know who they are. That means you need to conduct a lot of market research to discover how your customer ticks. Consider what their motivations are, their demographic, how they speak, the language they are likely to use, their likes and dislikes, etc.
The more you know about your customer, the more focused your marketing material and your website will be. Connecting with your customer on many levels, such as emotionally, intellectually, and visually, is your main objective. It means you are better able to design something that resonates with them, and this is how you drive sales.
Your Brand
To create an excellent brand, you need to, first of all, know your customer and then build a brand that helps you connect with them. A brand is like a foundation on which all your marketing material can lie. Consider a creation story and brand narrative that helps you connect your brand to your customers. It is a way for them to understand you as a company, your motivations, and your vision for the future. A brand will help you develop a personality that will be present in all your material. A brand is an identity, it is who you are, and this creates cohesion and helps you develop trust and loyalty with your customer base.
The more true you can be to your foundation, the better. Consider things such as your company philosophy, your core values, and what you want your company culture to be like. These things are all vital components of your brand. All the background needs to be thought out before you develop your brand logo and color scheme.
The aim here is that the logo is far more than a recognizable symbol. It becomes a way for you to evoke an emotional response in your customer. If you can do this, then you have a strong brand that is likely to survive for the long haul. Your branding can then dictate how you communicate on your website. It can help you choose and create imagery, wording, videos, and much more. Branding is essential to modern business. Without it, you will find it difficult to compete with your competitors and therefore fall behind.
Relevant Content
A great social media post may entice a customer to click a link to your website, but you need the website to keep them there. First off, if you have a brand personality, the social media post will not appear as if it were stand-alone. It should be clear that it is part of the same company that runs this website, i.e., your brand personality, logo, colors, etc.
If there is a contrast here, people will think they have the wrong site. The landing page has to be well-planned. It has to show the customer what they want to see. The images, text and everything has to be related to why someone was clicking on the site in the first place. So, consider why someone is going to your site and ensure that it is clear.
When it comes to writing the content, you need to be succinct. Simplicity is the aim of the game. You want your customer to easily find the piece of information they are looking for pretty quickly without inundating them with superfluous data. Additionally, you want all your images, gifs, etc., to be in harmony with the text, not a distraction.
You don’t want costumes staring at an image, wondering how it is related to the subject. Everything has to be created with the aim of telling the customer what they want to know and enticing them to do what you want them to do. If you already have a website, it may be time to read through everything you have and start streamlining it.
Remove anything that detracts from the point or is simply filling up space. You do not need to fill up a whole page with text just because you think that it seems empty without it. If you think your pages seem empty, perhaps you need a new design for your website. It may be an idea to use a content management system instead of hosting your own site. Something like Wix is very simple to use and has a variety of designs, some of which may be more suitable for your requirements.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
If you want your website to be easily found by search engines, then you need to consider SEO. A potential customer will go online and type in a query into the search engine of their choice. The search engine then searches the whole of the internet, looking for sites that relate to that qwerty. It then starts listing the results in the order it perceives of relevance.
The better optimized your site is, the higher up the results will appear. This is important because most people do not go past the first page. To try and get your site higher up the results, you need to find out what your customer is likely to put into the search ensuing query bar and then litter your website with these keywords and phrases.
Another thing to consider is writing some relevant meta descriptions as the search engine uses these too. You also need to have fresh content updated on your site regularly too. As that is another piece of criteria the search engine uses to display results. The more recent the content, the higher up it appears. It is unfeasible to update your pages every week, so you need to find another solution.
A great way to do this is to have a blog. A blog can be added to every day if you want it to and can be loaded with what keywords you feel are relevant at that time. Customers may also use search operators to find things on your website. So it would help if you investigated how to use search operators in SEO to ensure that your site is as optimized as possible to enhance your chances of conversion.
Mobile Friendliness
If your site looks great on a desktop but rubbish on a smartphone, then you will be losing a lot of customers. Most people use their mobile devices these days to look for products and services. So your site must appear great on all phones, Android, iPhone, and all browsers.
In fact, Google started penalizing sites that aren’t optimized for mobiles, so you need to be hot on this. This can prove quite a challenge and can mean a lot of testing. However, if you are not an I.T whizz, then a content management system will have mobile friendliness sorted as part of the deal. This can solve a lot of issues for you.
Page Speed
If you want your customer to get bored of your site and create a huge bounce rate, then have a slow site. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a page to load. In fact, anything more than two seconds is the cut-off. People click off after that time. Honestly, a slow site makes your whole company look bad. So, if your site is slow loading, you need to find ways to speed it up.
These include compressing and optimizing your images, reducing redirects, caching your website, get rid of unnecessary plug-ins and gifs, for example. Speeding up your site up, so it is better able to compete is essential to the overall success of your business.