Time for a little (website) spring cleaning! Your site goes far beyond a digital brochure for your business and there are critical elements needed for a successful site. So what exactly constitutes a successful site and how do we get there?
User-to-Customer Journey
It begins with thinking about your potential customer’s path and what you want them to do once they get on your website. Is it make a purchase? Sign up for your mailing list? Comment on your blog post? You may have more than one goal, but it’s imperative that you prioritize; if you can’t figure out what you want someone to do, how are they going to be able to?
Your website can guide them along every step of the way, beginning with awareness. Likely, that awareness will begin with online research as they take to the search engines to find the info they need. Now more than ever, it is important to have an optimized online presence so that your business shows up when potential clients do their research.
Once found, your website needs to begin to build authority so they recognize you as the leader in your industry or expertise. From there, you have an opportunity to further educate them and inform them on how you can solve their problem, with the hope that they will convert to a purchaser.
Keeping that journey in mind, there are some key elements every website should have to help a potential customer along their way. If your site doesn’t include any of the following items, this is the perfect season to freshen up your content and design.
Top 8 Website Must Haves:
- Contact info: seems basic, but don’t make users work to find how to reach you! Don’t forget to reinforce your contact methods within your content (looking at you, CTAs)
- Clear ‘About’ page: people care about with whom they’re doing business so a brief company history can make a big difference when trying to attract customers.
- CTAs (calls to action): guide users on their conversion to becoming a customer with links and buttons leading them towards your end goals (i.e., purchasing, signing up for a newsletter, etc.)
- Good, clean design: you have the tiniest sliver of time to make an impression so make sure your design is visually appealing so users don’t bounce off your site.
- Easy navigation: even if you’re offering the best product or service in your market, it won’t do any good if users can’t find what they need to convert to a customer. Site navigation and layout MUST be simple and reasonably organized.
- Positive feedback: build that trust and credibility by sharing the experience of past clients/customers. Either through a dedicated testimonials page, or sprinkled throughout other pages, potential customers want to know about your previous successes. This helps them envision how you can help.
- Good content: well-written copy and high-quality imagery created with the tone of your brand in mind in critical to success. Quality content will make it easier for users to understand and relate with what you’re all about.
- Responsive (mobile-friendly): in order to provide a top-notch user experience (a cornerstone to Google’s SEO algorithm) you MUST have a website that looks good on any size device and more importantly is optimized for various devices, meaning no large images on small phones, for starters.
So, did you go through your site and check these off your list? If not, get that spring cleaning going!