Everything to do with marketing your business needs to start with your website and online presence.
A website is an online storefront for your business, presenting what you have to offer and your company’s culture, mission, and vision. It needs to inspire people to trust you and to take action. It also needs to be set up so that you’re discoverable by potential customers seeking information on a search engine.
Your Website Needs 6 Things to Succeed
- Content that Speaks Directly to Your Target Audience
- User-Friendly Experience
- Website Design Framework
- SEO
- Analytics
- Promotion
“75% of consumers admit that they judge businesses’ credibility
Source
based on their web design.”
Your Website design is single-handedly the first impression a visitor gets to understand your business fully. It is an opportunity to create a perception of your business that you want your visitors to have.
It needs to invoke a positive reaction from visitors to continue through your site, read your content, use your services, and return as loyal customers.
7 Benefits of A Well-Designed Website
- Builds a loyal following
- Sets a foundation for customer expectations
- Builds brand value and trust
- Establishes reliability and understanding
- Establishes your authority
- Brings customers along with your business journey
- Determines values associated with your company
*Basically, your website sets your company apart from your competition.
Website Content
Your website content has the ability to convey messages to your audience, addressing their search intentions. It is a way to get your message out to your customers and provide them with any additional information they seek. Ultimately, it sets your business up as the authority in the field, takes your customer on a journey with your brand, and gets your audience to take action.
The content on your website can come in many different forms, including service or product descriptions, blog posts, resource guides, white papers, and even downloadables.
Analyzing your competition is a good way to determine what your customers want regarding content. By looking at your competitors, you will get insight into what, when, and how they are getting their content to their audience and how you can create a content marketing strategy that addresses your audience’s needs.
The bottom line is your audience desires good, quality information.
USER EXPERIENCE
Good websites consider the visitor first with a bold user experience, easy-to-follow menu, clear call-to-action steps, compelling landing pages, and easy-to-digest information.
The goal is to keep the audience engaged and focused on what you want them to do with your website. Lead your visitors through your website with understandable ease, and you will get them to engage deeper with your brand and ultimately get them to purchase your product or service.
Your website should be designed in an easy-to-navigate way that is easy for any customer to find what they are looking for. The goal is to think like a customer and prepare a seamless user journey that sets you apart with a dynamic experience for your audience.
DESIGN
The framework of your website is very important for how your website loads and ultimately ranks on search engines. Choosing the right platform that can handle your companies marketing goals and traffic is a super important step. Not every platform is created equal. Know what you are looking for.
Every opportunity to connect with your audience, from your website to your email campaigns, must be optimized for mobile. The last thing you want is for your well-designed website and content to be laid out awkwardly for the viewer. Remember you need to meet your audience where they are and present in the best possible way, so make sure every design is mobile-friendly.
SEO
The infrastructure on your website is important for search engines to discover your website. Optimizing your website for search has two main components, on-page and off-page SEO.
In order for your content to be indexed by search engines and crawled, there are specific items you need to consider, including headers, meta descriptions, and more. The main focus of the page must be unmistakable. The goal is to focus on one main keyword for each content page you create. All relative keywords around the topic should be included within the text. The key is not to overuse the keyword, as it will affect your rankings on search engines.
More specifically, it is important to audit your website to ensure that there are no errors that would affect your website in ways that get penalized by search engines or, even worse, turn off prospective customers like the dreaded 404 error- page not found!
Off-page SEO is another important aspect of getting recognized online. To build your reputation, you must drive traffic to your website. Getting credible backlinks to your website is how you build your domain authority and expand your reach online. Link building, both internal and external, is an important strategy for SEO.
SEO is an ongoing process and a long-time goal. The benefits will build over time and continually enhance your online presence and visibility online.
Know Your Analytics.
Understand what, why, and how people are using your website. Free tools like Google Analytics or Paid options like SEMRush or HotJar allow you to analyze your website visitors.
Analytics allows insight into your customer’s actions on your website, where they came from, how long they stayed, how deep they went on your website, and demographics. The analytics are invaluable to see what is working, what is not, and how you can improve your marketing strategies in the future.
PROMOTION
Once you have your site set up, remember the next part of any good digital marketing strategy is to get traffic to your website. Think about a social media strategy or digital marketing campaign to increase traffic and ultimately backlinks.
Websites are powerful marketing tools for your business.
Disclosure: Some of the links included in this blog post are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase.