With all the competition online, it’s not enough to have just one website. We’ve separated 12 tips that will show you how to make your website easy for potential customers to find and use. Nowadays, an online presence is vital for any business, even those that are small and have few pages.
Creating a Web design in San Francisco is not especially difficult with the many website building tools available. Whichever software or platform you choose, or even an HTML-only website, keep these design, programming, and content principles in mind.
We’ve separated 12 tips that will show you how to make your website easy for potential customers to find and use.
Make your Website responsive with Web Design Agency San Francisco
Mobile responsiveness is critical for a website to be effective. Adults spend more than five hours on their cell phones every day, while more than a third do all of their shopping online through a mobile device. Needless to say, your company’s mobile site should provide a positive user experience.
If potential customers land on your site but find it difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may simply abandon your site and opt for a competitor.
Also, a negative mobile user experience affects your site in search engine rankings, making it harder for users to find via a Google search – which brings us to our next point.
Make it easy to search with an easy domain name
You need a domain name that matches your business name or that describes your business in some way. You can even have multiple domains that point to your website.
This means incorporating technical best practices from SEO, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns to drive traffic to your website.
Put your Contact information at the top
If your business depends on people who can contact you or call your sales team, put that information where they can easily find it.
Your contact information should be visible, preferably at the top of the homepage, so that visitors don’t have to look up a phone number or address if they want to contact the company.
If you use social media to connect with customers, place your social links in the header or footer of your website where they are easily found.
Make Navigation Easier
Dan Veltri, co-founder, and chief product officer at Weebly, advises limiting your top-level navigation menu to five clearly labeled tabs, with related pages organized under them.
You should also provide a clear way to get back to the homepage, no matter where your readers land on your site. Very often, a Google search can lead your reader to a page on your site other than the home page.
Keep your pages in context
Anyone who visits your site needs to be able to put information into context. If a website has too much information, it overloads the mind, making it unable to retain it. Be sure to use a good balance of text and graphics that present a clean page.
One way to keep it simple is to remove unnecessary elements that are misused, such as social media widgets, their feed on your website, and others that don’t support the purpose of the page.
Make sure it’s correct
Inaccurate information will convey distrust to consumers, whether it’s a wrong number, outdated product information, or simple grammatical errors.
You should not only review each page before it goes live but also periodically check each page, especially after making updates elsewhere.
Decrease Site loading speed
A study by Xum digital marketing company Akamai found that 88.5% of web users will leave a website if it loads too slowly. Additionally, the time it takes to load a page affects the purchasing decisions of nearly 70% of online shoppers.
Make sure your website runs smoothly by keeping your software up to date, optimizing videos and images for faster downloads, and using a website hosting that can handle your bandwidth demands.
We always recommend the use of VPS for website hosting, as it is the type of hosting with the best cost x benefit, so that it has a better performance of resources in general.
Have a call to action (CTA)
Every page on your site should prompt the reader to do something. In other words, you need to call them to action.
These landing pages should encourage users to take a certain action, such as calling your business, subscribing to a service, purchasing a product, downloading a file, or doing something else that benefits your business goals.
Make a noticeable invitation to take action: a button, a link, or a clear call. Keep it above the fold if possible so readers don’t have to scroll before finding the call to action.
Keep your Website simple
Limit the use of fonts, colors, and GIFs, which can be distracting and take your eyes off the site’s focus. Short paragraphs and a list of items also make the information more scan-able and more likely to be read. Ian Lurie, CEO of Internet marketing company Portent Inc., suggests keeping paragraphs shorter than six lines.
This is especially important when it comes to mobile reactivity, which is a major factor in how Google ranks websites in its algorithm.
The better a website ranks, the higher it appears on the search engine results page (SERP). If a competitor is mobile-friendly and your website is not, you could lose positions in search results, decreasing your chances of being found by your customers.
Be Personal
Just as companies invest heavily in their storefronts to represent their brand images, e-commerce retailers need to create high-quality online experiences.
To do this, your About Us page should not be a dry block of text about your company. Emily Brackett, president of design and branding company Visible Logic, recommends including a good photo of her or her team to customize the experience for your customers.
Make sure your Content is Customer-oriented
Potential customers come to your site for information that is useful to them. Sometimes they come for educational content on your blog and other times they are focused on researching the products and services you sell.
Either way, you should present relevant information that engages your prospects, gives them something of value, and inspires them with confidence in your experience. When you’re planning your site’s content, try to think about it from the customer’s point of view.
If you were a potential customer, what information would you find useful? What level of knowledge or experience would you already have, and what would need to be explained in more detail?
By focusing on your content from the customer’s point of view, you can keep them on your site longer and are more likely to build a long-term relationship with them that results in a sale.
Not a writer? No problem; just outsource it to a professional copywriter.
Incorporate SEO best practices
You can have the best website in your field, but it’s no use if people can’t find it. While you can spend money on ads to drive potential customers to your site, it’s more cost-effective and effective in the long run to bring free organic search traffic to your site.
When people are looking for information online, they go to search engines, especially Google. They usually find what they’re looking for on the first page of search results, so that’s where you want your business to appear.
Google and other search engines have algorithms that they use to rank websites in search terms, which have been greatly impacted by their latest updates.
Search engines use three ways to determine where your listing appears: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Tracking means they find your site through links from other sites. So make sure that links to your site appear on as many external sites as possible and are related to your niche.
Once your site is discovered by crawling bots, it is indexed, which means it is analyzed for content, including keywords, whether it is recent, relevant, links, or media. Make sure your site has lots of fresh and relevant content related to the keywords you want to rank for.
Finally, ranking is how search engines determine the best results for a given search. The ranking is based on the experience, authority, and trust that Google has in your site.
Include a lot of relevant content, such as individual articles on different aspects of a specific topic. Authority is established by the size of your site, your traffic, and how many other well-respected sites link to yours.
Xum Digital is a boutique yet an International Digital Marketing Agency based in Costa Rica and San Francisco, California.