It isn’t exactly difficult to set up your own business website, but what can be difficult is bringing in the traffic that you want, and keeping them on your site long enough to, hopefully, make a conversion.
There are many things that your average Joe may forget when trying to create their own website or be completely oblivious to.
Here are five steps that you should follow as a business owner to ensure that your website is one of the best in the industry:
Choose Your Web Host or Developer
If you’re completely new to building a website, then thankfully there are tools such as Gutenberg that make building a website on WordPress from scratch straight forward. This website explains all the great benefits of using the new Gutenberg tool, including the simplicities behind adding video, adding text and images through the use of blocks.
If you don’t think that creating your own website is a possibility, then it might be worth hiring a web developer, such as Illustrate Digital, who will be able to do it all for you. They will be able to design your website with your goals and style in mind, giving your users a pleasant experience.
Think About Onsite and Offsite SEO
Having a strong SEO strategy and thinking about what sorts of keywords your new website will rank for is important for attracting the right users, and making sure your site appears as one of the top in the industry. Combine keywords with page loading times and the security delivered by your host in order to bring in extra custom.
Offsite SEO is equally as important. In simple forms, this is ensuring that other websites are linking back to your website. This will help give your website a boost in authority and effectively tell Google that your website can be trusted and is authoritative by giving some of their link juice to your site.
Naturally, link juice will sound a tad weird, so if you need some further explanation, check out this blog post by Liberty Marketing, which explains link juice using coffee.
Stay on Brand
You don’t want a user to arrive onto your site and then click onto a new page thinking they are on a whole new website. Ensure that your headers and footers of a website stay the exact same while keeping logos in the same place and using the same colour scheme and design template throughout.
Not only will this be easier on the user’s eye, but it will also ensure that your brand becomes instantly more recognisable and established.
Easier User Experience
Have you ever heard of the Three Click Rule? No? Well, it basically means that a user should be able to find what they’re looking for on a website through just three clicks. You shouldn’t create too many categories on your menu, and you should only add the very most important things.
For example, if someone wants to find a red lipstick on a beauty website, ideally they should click face, then lips, then colour. Voila, found in three clicks. It makes it less confusing for the user and therefore should hopefully keep them on your site for longer.
Make it Mobile Friendly
Over 50% of web pages are now viewed on a phone or tablet rather than a laptop. This means that in an ideal world, your website should work just as well, if not better, on a mobile.
There are simple ways to improve your website so that it is suitable for both a computer and a mobile. Some of these include shrinking images to ensure the loading times are quicker, using bigger fonts to make it easier on the eye and to avoid using Flash, as that can also slow down the load time of a page.
