Whether you have a shoestring budget or an enterprise-level operation, a solid website can open up a world of possibilities.
An excellent website considers the visitor first, provides an excellent user experience and can be a powerful marketing tool.
Digital marketing drives people to your website – now you need to deliver the experience they expect.
Here’s how.
1. Define your goals clearly
Web or marketing projects should always begin with goals, but we should also consider ourselves and our users.
It is only when we deliver what our target audience wants in a satisfactory manner that the site can generate traffic, leads, and sales.
Goals should be easy to define for both the organization and the user.
If the goals aren’t aligned, you will likely struggle to make profits while not being able to deliver the product and experience your audience wants.
A website that everyone is bouncing from, where no one understands why they should buy from, is painful to invest time and money into. Your focus was too much on your end goals and not theirs, which is a big warning sign.
2. Budget Properly
Make sure you invest in your web presence. Several brands I’ve known had overspent on their sites and then went cheap on marketing. Conversely, there are those who are only concerned with marketing and do not care about their website.
Choose the right CMS, technology, and type of site for your needs.
Is it off the shelf? Make sure you understand the limitations so you don’t have to throw it away and start over.
Is there a custom design and/or custom code? Your breakeven point shouldn’t be pushed too far away from your breakeven point if it is overkill.
Don’t oversell or undersell. Make the right business decisions by knowing what your upfront and incremental investments are.
3. Gain the trust of your audience
Make sure that what you’re offering and what you want your audience to do is clear and transparent.
Identify their motivations and your strengths. There are too many websites that lack the emotional or credibility connections necessary to earn trust and a lead or sale. You should not just be another commodity site in the space. Users want to know who they are doing business with. You won’t be able to describe what you’re about if you don’t have names, pictures, culture, philosophy, or some type of story on your website. It is important to your customers to know what your intentions are. Even budget-conscious shoppers need to feel confident that you’re a legitimate business before entering their credit card information.
4. Stand out from the crowd
The key to differentiation is differentiation. A website template can still look different if you customize it. You can stand out by customizing imagery and styles to match your brand. Earning trust goes hand in hand with this. You create the bond needed to stand out from other templated and quickly spun-up sites selling the same products when you tell your story and incorporate factors like price, quality, customer service, profits, and giving back.
5. A focus on usability and user experience
Provide easy access to the content your audience wants. If your website is a viral video site, focus on landing users on video pages. Make sure users can easily reach the desired page with the fewest clicks possible if you offer products or services. Think about where your search box is placed and other cues to get to popular content, in addition to creating an intuitive main menu navigation. Don’t assume that users will click several times to get to the latest cat video or the hottest product.
6. Keep in mind the SEO fundamentals
Don’t forget about SEO, even though it seems simple. Make sure you understand how search engines crawl and index your content and optimize the basic on-page factors. By using plugins and semantic coding, you can make this process easier.
You can win half the battle if you can at least make sure that your content can be indexed (and is being indexed) and that your on-page elements are customized to reflect what your content is and is about, since SEO has technical aspects and goes beyond on-page.
7. Make your landing pages more effective
Campaigns benefit greatly from landing pages. Marketing efforts include PPC ads, email promotions, and inbound marketing.
If you’re doing any marketing, you need a system that allows you to quickly create and customize landing pages. If you’re using these pages for dedicated campaigns outside of navigable, normal website content, make sure your website or content management system gives you control over indexing status, changes navigation, and separates them from the normal navigation paths.
8. Analyze your data
The installation of Google Analytics on your site is just the first step, but go beyond that.
If you don’t set them up, you won’t be able to get information about demographics, goal completions, and more. Do not assume that you can set it and forget it and check back in a few months to see how things are going. Google Analytics does not require you to log in every day. Set up some reports and alerts that automatically come to you after you get it customized so that you know what is working and what isn’t and can adjust on the fly rather than reacting when it’s too late.
9. Using heat maps as a learning tool
Using tools such as heat mapping and on-page analytics can provide additional insights into the user experience.
UX plays a crucial role in the success of a website.
It’s hard to tell how far users scroll, where their mouse tracks, how much of your form they complete before bailing out, where they get stuck on your website, etc., with tools like Lucky Orange (I’m a customer and fan – not paid endorser).
When you monitor this level of detail, you can fix UX hangups and fine-tune the site to reach its full potential.
10. Ensure that your website is always up and running
When it comes to making sure our websites work, uptime is often all we think about.
In spite of this, you may not notice issues like JavaScript not firing, buttons not working, or browser-specific bugs without the right protocols in place.
If you monitor sales data and uptime alone, you may miss that a segment of your audience is having trouble.
You won’t get many users contacting you if they can’t buy or access the content they want – they’ll just leave.
Conclusion
Creating a great website for a small business is not as easy as you may think after reading this article. The steps outlined in this article will help your small business succeed online if you follow them. To know more about this contact Carmatec Qatar.
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