In today’s digital marketing environment your website is your storefront. Your website is where most of your visitors will get their first impression of your business. You want them to visit, browse, stay, learn and connect with your products and services. Your website is always selling! It is your business’s best marketing tool! So when you build your website it is essential to put the same kind of thought, effort and expertise into its construction as you would into building your storefront. Digital marketers have lots of recommendations for your website, but the following six tips will help you build your website much like you would build your storefront.
Build your website to be attractive!
When you build a storefront you want it to be attractive so that it will draw in your customers. You want it to show off what you sell, what you believe in, your personality, your brand. The same needs to be true when your digital ad agency builds your website! When you get users to land on your website you want to keep them there and guide them to find what they are looking for. This is much easier when you have an attractive website.
A clean, consistent and appealing design will hold your visitors attention and lead them seamlessly into your content, products and services.
Here are some tips to make your website attractive and effective:
- Create easy to follow navigation guides and clear calls to action that keep your visitors moving seamlessly through your website.
- Use fonts, font sizes and colors that make it easy to read your website.
- Simplicity of design is your friend.
Build your website to be social!
The internet is increasingly a place of social sharing for almost all of us. When a visitor to your website finds a blog or product and they want to share it with their friends it is vital that your website is equipped with social sharing options and share buttons.
Digital marketers know that people are socially wired to share things with their social networks when they find interesting articles, exciting products and unique services on the internet. When your website makes it easy to share social posts you hold your viewers attention and expand your reach and footprint.
Build your website to be responsive!
Your customers and potential customers want consistency when they visit your website. This just means that whether they are looking for you on their desktops, laptops or their mobile devices they will have a uniform experience with your company. Digital ad agencies will all tell you that this is vital. Just like a chain of storefront businesses look to create a uniform experience for their customers, so your website must maintain this unity. So if your website looks different to users on their phones than it does to those on their computers then it’s time to update your website to be more responsive.
Changing your website be become more responsive will magnify its sales opportunities in five ways:
- It will improve the speed of your website and keep users attention.
- It will support social sharing so your site maximizes outreach and growth.
- It will increase your website’s favorability on Google and other search engines so that you get ranked higher when people search for your products or services.
- It will decrease your bounce rate and keep your users engaged longer.
- It will save you money because you won’t support two versions of your website.
Build your website to be engaging!
The content of your website is how people will connect with you. It also needs to be easy to access. Ease of navigation and quality content will likely determine whether they use and benefit from your products or services and whether they share your site with others. Your content needs to be clear, engaging, relevant and consistent.
People are searching for information all of the time, so including an interesting and informative blog will likely be helpful to them and to you!
Blogs are extremely effective tools but they require frequent and consistent attention. Not everyone can write a new blog post every week or two. If that is the case for you then consider,
- Hiring a content writer for your website’s blog
- Hiring a Digital Marketing company to work with your website and its content.
Blogs are an incredibly effective way to build trust, to show your expertise, to offer quality content and in turn to build your business.
Build your website to be SEO friendly!
SEO is digital marketers speak. It means Search Engine Optimization, which simply means making your website more readable by search engines. Whether you or your Digital Marketing company are designing your website, make sure that you include basic on-page SEO, because this will allow you to improve your rank in search engines. Digital advertising agencies can help you in this process whether you are redesigning your website or building a new one. A few important things to include to make your website SEO friendly are:
- Use keyword/concept based research to find keywords that your users might use in their searches.
- Include links to both external and internal sources to build trust with your users.
- If redesigning your website make sure you redirect your old URLs to your new website. This will maintain traffic from your old website to your new.
- Optimize your images by adding the name and alt tag to them along with a couple of keywords.
Build your website to be smart!
Smart websites adjust the content of your website for users who have previously visited your site, have filled out a form on your website, or have become customers. That’s smart!
When your website is smart and a visitor returns to it the content becomes personalized based on previous browsing, information gathered from them on your site, their personal interests and browsing behavior. Smart websites are shown to improve your users experience and lead to improved leads and conversions. And why not, when they are responding to your users own personalities, needs, and unique wants and needs.
Make your website an amazing storefront for your business!
Websites are essential to business. They are your very own digital storefront. In fact you don’t need to sell things online in order to need a website. Powerful websites are gorgeous, they are on brand (so, it looks and feels like you want it to, communicating properly to the right people who want to shop you), they are super easy to navigate and to get what you want quickly, they are a fun experience, informative, and will show you to be a thought leader in your field. Digital marketing companies work hard to create this amazing storefront for your business, cause or non-profit. The goal is to get as many people as possible to go to your website and look around! And while they’re looking, entice them to do something – buy online, call, email, chat, fill out a form, whatever. Because if your website isn’t converting leads, sales and interest for you, it’s useless.
