A website has become the way we shop, search, and stay in touch with others. With such an important presence in our lives, it’s natural to want to invest in an effective and beautiful site that can help you grow your business and increase brand awareness.
However, with so many different website builders available, it can be hard to know where to start.
While having a website of your own is extremely important, if you want to see an actual ROI from your site there are key criteria that must fulfill your site to be truly effective.
1) SEO
Search Engine Optimization is an essential aspect of having a website that can effectively attract new customers.
Without SEO, even if you have a well-designed site, it will only receive the fraction of traffic that it deserves.
By ensuring your pages are optimized through keyword research and consideration of how Google works, you can ensure more people see your site in their search results.
With optimized content and links within pages too, your website will continue to bring traffic long after it is built and ranked on search engines like Google.
2) Responsive Design
Responsive design is not nice to have, it’s an absolute must if you want a mobile-friendly website.
With people using smartphones and tablets more than ever, your site needs to work seamlessly on all screens and devices. Having a mobile-responsive website allows for easy sharing, viewing, and increases overall user engagement on your site.
A responsive design also can help with search engine optimization (SEO) because Google prefers websites that are optimized for multiple screen sizes and browsers.
3) Credibility
Believe it or not, your website should be credible. This means that you must have contact information, disclaimers, and terms of use on every page.
Any testimonials and contact info should be clearly visible on your homepage as well. It is also important to ensure that you do not make any false claims about any services or products offered by your site in order to maintain credibility.
Visitors will think twice before trusting an unprofessional-looking site with false or misleading claims. If they feel tricked or deceived, they are far less likely to purchase from you or recommend your business to others. You should never promise a quick fix solution as well because that is most likely a lie!
4) Fast Load Times
When people visit your site, they shouldn’t have to wait long.
A good benchmark is about three seconds – but that depends on your business.
For example, a website selling music or video might want a longer load time because of graphics and other multimedia elements.
But if you’re selling products and services, speed is key. If your site takes too long to load, visitors may think you have spammy ads or not trust your product/service enough to buy.
5) Mobile Friendly Navigation
The easiest way to tell if a website is responsive is to see if it works on your phone. If you can navigate through a site from your smartphone, then it’s most likely built in HTML5 and responsive.
The Internet has become mobile-friendly, so even if you don’t have a smartphone, take it out of your pocket and look at a few different websites.
Make sure they're easy to navigate and function well on small screens. You'll instantly notice that some sites are optimized for phones while others are not; getting feedback from mobile users could be useful in gauging how many people will be able to access and use your site effectively.
6) User Experience / Usability
If a website is difficult to use, it is unlikely that people will stick around. The navigation needs to be intuitive and it must be simple to find what you are looking for.
Many sites get caught up on how their site looks and forget about whether or not people can actually find what they are looking for. With so many choices available, if your website is cumbersome and hard to navigate, you will quickly lose your users’ attention.
In order to make sure that happens, a user-friendly experience should be considered at all times while designing your site.
7) Content Upgrades & Email Capture Pages
These are key elements of a strong website. In simple terms, an effective website has several components in place to support both SEO and conversion rate optimization efforts.
At a minimum, these include content upgrades and email capture pages; there may be other components as well but these two have demonstrated effectiveness time and again.
When done properly, content upgrades do double duty: they provide valuable information to users interested in your topic area, while at the same time allowing you to display advertising and cross-sell products on that page.
A capture page serves a similar purpose; it gets people who've been referred from an external site (like Google) to input their contact information so that you can reach out and follow up with them directly over email.
8) Marketing Integration
A good website must be integrated with your other marketing efforts.
For example, if you are an online business and you want to get visitors from search engines then it is important that your site has been built using SEO standards to ensure that it will be picked up by search engines.
If you also have a social media presence, make sure that your website incorporates aspects of those channels into its design and layout so they complement each other rather than conflict.
A good website should be able to function independently but also work in conjunction with your other marketing efforts.
9) Clear Call-to-Action(s)
A clear, actionable call-to-action (CTA) should be placed prominently on every page of your website and encourage people to click.
It should direct them to where they can purchase a product or service, view a video, sign up for a webinar, download an e-book, etc. If you don’t have a CTA on your landing page, then it’s likely that you will lose sales because visitors will find what they are looking for somewhere else and never return to your site.
You might even lose potential customers because they think you are unprofessional. In other words—it doesn’t matter how great your content is if no one is clicking through from your site to learn more about it.
10) Value vs. Cost Comparison
The first thing to think about when creating a website is who is your target audience. When you determine a specific audience, it makes it much easier to craft content that will be appealing and relevant to them.
How do you determine your target audience?
Do some research and put yourself in their shoes.
What is their pain point or reason for visiting your site?
With every page on your site, make sure there is a clear value proposition of what people will get from viewing it.
The same goes with providing a way for them to contact you (phone number, email address) so they can find more value down the road if need be.
Another cost-effective strategy would be working with an organization such as LocalNetWorks which offers affordable websites and local search options.
Friday Website Builder
A lot of people have heard of Friday and have used it in a let's just get a website up quick sort of way. It's easy to use and can get you up and running fast. If you are willing to go fast and safely then we recommend using the Friday website builder.
It has great templates that are conversion and e-commerce focused. Also, if you're looking to stand out from the competition, Friday is going to help with that too. Learn more about why you should use a website builder to create your website.
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