3 Keys to Building a Successful Website

In today’s digital world, every organization needs a website. This is especially true for small businesses and service providers.

Don’t just build a website, build the right website for your business. Use these three keys to create a successful website for your business:

Design and Function

Identify the primary purpose of your site, and make sure the design is optimized for your purpose and the target audience. A business website might be a tool for lead generation or a portal for an online store. Think about how your successful website will be used before you jump in and start building; this will ensure that your website is easy to use and customer friendly.

Over the past few years, there has been a shift from desktop to mobile browsing. This means that your site should have a responsive design or a separate mobile website. Make sure that the site loads and renders correctly on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Otherwise, you might lose out on of potential website visitors, leads, and customers.

If you want to learn more about creating a mobile friendly website, read our blog post: What the Heck is a “Mobile-Friendly” Website?

When you finish designing your website, it’s time to plug in your text. A website with plain text is boring, use this opportunity to use images and videos to improve visual appeal. Depending on your business objectives, you may need shopping carts, social media implementation or even a newsfeed. You don’t need to overload your website with all of the bells and whistles, but a responsive, professional platform will elevate the value of your business.

Keywords and SEO

If your website doesn’t have keywords, then search engines – and the customers who use them – won’t be able to find you. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is when the content of a website is optimized, so it ranks higher on search engines such as Google or Bing.

Create a list of the keywords your customers will use when searching for your website; be sure to include all of the variations. Then work your keywords into the site’s content and design. You can do this a few different ways:

1. Headers and subheaders
2. Use images with alt- tags
3. Fill in the meta description
4. Customize your URL

If you want to learn more about optimizing your website with keywords and SEO, read our blog post: How to Quickly Optimize All Your Website Pages.

Tracking and Performance

You don’t want to maintain a beautiful website that is not delivering the right leads. That’s why it’s important to track your website’s performance to determine your success rate. That stats you monitor will depend on the core purpose of your site, but there are some standard metrics that everyone should watch:

• Audience Reach – To determine your audience reach, you will need to track the number of visits and unique visitors. This figure, when regularly monitored, can show if your audience is growing and how quickly.
• Traffic Sources – Monitoring your traffic allows you to improve your marketing techniques. Some examples of traffic sources include organic, referrals, social media, etc.
• Conversion Rates – You may have a large audience but what they do when they arrive at your website is more important. Try to increase conversion rates by creating clear call-to-actions for your visitors. Some examples are downloadable content, a chat window, newsletter sign up form, etc.

There are multiple tools out there, such as Google Analytics that you can use to track these metrics. It’s a great practice to collect and monitor your website analytics regularly. Try to collect your data once a month and watch the highlights above.

Don’t just build a website, build a successful website for your business. Are you ready for the next step? Read our post: How to Make Sure You Have Complete Web Design to learn more about creating a web design that delivers.

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