Your first impression of a potential customer is through the company’s website. Making sure your site showcases your company in the best possible light is vital to the success of your business: your services, products, and your company’s purpose. Here are the most important criteria to maximize the effectiveness of your website.
Well Designed
Visitors to your site will form an opinion about your business within a few seconds. Your site should be clean, professional, and convey your company’s image/brand. The navigation should be straightforward and make it easy for visitors to find the information they are seeking with one or two clicks. What your business does should be easily discernible within a few seconds.
Well Written Content
While a good design is important, the content on your site is crucial. This content needs to speak directly to your target audience. The copy should be written in a professional, yet conversational, tone and should impart a sense of the company’s personality. If the copy is dry and too “corporate”, you run the risk of losing your visitors’ interest and their business.
Most business websites include contents that help to tell their story and provide information on the services & products they offer.
Educate. Don’t Sell.
Including an “About Us” page, a “Portfolio”, “News & Events”, etc. on your website is important and visitors will become suspect if this type of information is not present on your site. However, one of the main goals of your website should be to educate your audience, not sell them. Your visitors have come to your site with a need or desire. They don’t want to be sold. They want to make an educated decision and want to know about their options and how your products or services will provide solutions to their problems. Creating your website’s content with a focus on educating visitors will make it easier to shift the focus away from your business and onto your potential customers and what’s in it for them.
Make Your Content Sharable & Easy to Subscribe to
The easier you make it for people to share and subscribe to the content on your site, the more likely your target market will share it with their network (many of whom share similar demographics, needs & desires) and be exposed to your company on an ongoing basis. Adding Facebook “Like” buttons, or “Share This” capabilities. RSS buttons & blog email subscription capabilities to articles, posts, case studies, etc. makes it super easy for visitors to receive your content and share it with others.
Place Calls to Actions on Every Page
It’s important to place calls to action on each page of your website so your prospects can easily take the next step (fill-out a “Request a Quote” form, click on the “Buy Now” button, sign-up for your monthly e-newsletter, etc.) once they’ve determined your business is a good fit for them and can solve their problems. Ideally, a call to action should be placed at the end of the text on each web page and on the top-right side of each page. The more prominent the call-to-action button, the more likely a visitor is to click on it.
Optimize each Page for the Search Engines
When seeking out products or services, customers are using search engines above all else to conduct searches. For this reason, each page of your website should be optimized and set-up in a way that makes it easy for the search engines to capture the information.
It is important to have a deep understanding of your target market’s needs and desires so you can capture your ideal prospects’ attention quickly by speaking directly to them with your marketing message. Incorporating these six criteria into your website will help you to maximize the effectiveness of your website and your company’s reach.
ITConnexion’s Software & Website Development Team has helped many businesses and organisations in building effective websites. Here is one of our latest website creations: SUZUKI MUSIC
