Anyone who owns a business understands just how key their website really is. This is one of the major assets that will boost your company and take it to new heights. There are so many ways to increase your customer base, help a brand grow, and create real impact by fine-tuning an online presence. These six key features are all it takes to make a real, professional website stand out from the crowd.
Why Is a Website Essential for a Modern Business?
In the UK alone, there are more than 60 million people who shop and look for services online. Stop and take that in for a second. Over 60 million customers are ready and waiting for you to show them what you’ve got, and this journey begins with how you use your online presence. A website is an incredibly useful tool because it opens the door to engagement, and this is where the journey begins. It is hard to find a shopper who doesn’t look online before they head to a store, and lots of modern businesses even run exclusive e-platforms. This is the norm in 2023, and it is only set to grow. It makes sense to be on board with this shift and see what the online world has to offer from a business perspective. So, what does your website really need?
Top Features Overview
There are a lot of features discussed below, but none of these will matter if the core format doesn’t work. For a website to be good, it has to include things from the list but it should, above all else, focus on being user-friendly, wholly accessible and search engine ready.
SEO-Conscious Formatting
SEO is one of the major trends to emerge in the last decade. It is hard to escape its effectiveness, and it can do wonderful things when used correctly. It stands for Search Engine Optimisation and the basic concept is making sure your website shows up in the main search engines like Google. That way, when people use a search term keyword, your site will show up on their radar and you have more chance of creating a conversion. Here are some of the biggest things to include in your SEO strategy.
Keywords
The main point of SEO is to use the relevant keywords for your marketing campaign. What do you sell? Which audience are you trying to reach? These two questions will help you get started on finding the right keywords for your content. It is important not to fall into the trap of keyword stuffing because this is actually seen as a negative thing. However, it is easy enough to find the right balance and there is a ton of professional support out there if you need a boost.
Good Content
Content marketing is everywhere you look, so if you are going to dive in, make sure you are doing it well. Content must be effective, to the point, and completely relevant to what you are selling in order to hit home. You will need a strong topic to get started with, and this will help you build a great blog set of whitepapers or even PDF downloads for your potential customers. Don’t forget to make use of helpful tools like SmallPDF that enable you to convert PDF to Word formats, therefore making life easier when it comes to editing and changing the ever-evolving flow of content.
Functional Sites
The biggest factor to consider when looking at how functional your online presence is has to be whether or not it loads quickly enough. Over 80% of people are ready to click away from a website if it fails to load up fast enough, so what does this mean? In a nutshell, if your website and all of the pages within don’t load on screen in a convenient way, without glitching, you will have already lost the mind of potential customers. SEO means making sure your pages load up quickly and are easy to read so that convenience is at the top of the agenda at all times.
Customer Service
Let’s move on from SEO to talking about customer service. Customers want an omnichannel experience for their online shopping ventures, and this is a hard to deny fact. From a business point of view, this means setting up a live chat option so that any problems, questions, or chats can be answered straight away in the most convenient format. There should be multiple options that are easy to find so that people can get in touch with you any way they see fit. Make this information visible and in a really obvious place on the website, because customer service can have a major impact on how successful a website really is.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are specifically designed spaces for customers to leave their personal details and receive some kind of compensation or reward in return. For example, a promotional voucher or free download may encourage someone to sign up for a newsletter. If this happens, you have created a successful conversion and have someone new to contact about relevant products and services. You also make space for getting to know your customer base better and therefore tailoring their experience to what they want. This all leads to brand loyalty and higher conversion rates.
Legal Compliance
It is now a legal requirement for all companies to ask permission from their customers for things like cookie storage and data use. You have to be upfront about what you are doing and how you are storing information from the browsing experience, and people will feel better if you are upfront about it.
Linking Up the Socials
If you don’t have a clear link to your social media platforms, why not? These are some of the hottest spaces to be, and younger customers in particular will always turn to sites like Facebook and Instagram to get a sense of how you engage with the wider world. These are also core spaces for garnering reviews and letting your wider team interact with the masses. Make sure there is a big button or enough information that links through to all of your relevant social pages.
Analytic Factors
There is not much point at all in having a website if you don’t understand its impact. For a site to be good and reach the most people, you have to know what it is doing in the background. This means, being able to successfully track interactions as people browse and using that information to make the necessary improvements. There will always be pages that see more traffic than others and it can all be used to make the online presence better in the long run. Google Analytics lets you log in and see in real time what is happening and how you can make things more functional in general. By looking at the habits of your consumer base, you will be able to give them the experience that you think they want as opposed to guessing what the next best thing should be.
A professional website is one that considers the person using it. It must load fast, be completely interactive, and have enough compelling content to keep people’s attention. The whole point is to showcase what you do and create conversions, and there are useful strategies like SEO that can make this possible.
