Your website is not only an investment but an advertisement of your business, and if you are committed to making a success out of your business it pays to invest time into the design and functionality of your website.
If you are a SME it can be hard and taxing to be constantly splitting your time between winning new business and taking the time to optimise your website, but the website itself can be a great source of business and you owe it to yourself to invest time in putting together a great web presence – not only is it great PR but it will provide great rewards.
With this in mind, here are a few ideas on how to make sure your website is great and performs to your expectations:
Set Your Goals
Whether it’s an increase in conversions, sales, generating leads through your contact form, and/or improving brand awareness, setting workable and measurable goals that you can track through analytics will be a great measuring stick of how your website is meeting your expectations.
Go Open Source
Most websites are built using an open source content management system such as Magento if you’re e-commerce or WordPress for anything else. These each have a variety of useful plug-ins that can make your life easier and make your goals more attainable such as SEO Yoast and Google Analytics. Not only that but due to the amount of users and the open source nature of the choices, it means they are constantly being tweaked and perfected.
Deliver Readable and Engaging Content
With every minute on the internet seeing YouTube users uploading 300 hours of video, Facebook users sharing 684,478 pieces of content, and Tumblr seeing 27,778 new posts published, how do you get noticed? By taking a journalistic approach to your industry and providing news and insight consistently it ensures a strong web presence, an increase in traffic, and opportunity for further conversions. All content marketing takes is a smart approach and a nuanced eye. Not only that but it can feed directly into…
[tweetthis]Providing news and insight consistently ensures a strong web presence, an increase in traffic, and opportunity for further conversions[/tweetthis]
Take Advantage Of Your Data
A great way to keep your brand and website in people’s minds is a regular newsletter. This is a great way to promote your content as well as special offers on the website and is a really useful way of taking advantage of your current customer data. Off the back of this, the data becomes more and more valuable as you learn about your audience – what content created the most clicks? How many people unsubscribed? – then use the data to refine the approach for your next newsletter.
The Audience Is Always Right
Remember that your website is for your audience, it’s not necessarily for you. When you’re building your site or having it built for you, make sure you ask any existing customers you’re in contact with for their feedback. Website design, blog content, product descriptions and sale incentives should all be geared to enticing more customers or clients and satisfying current ones.
