Your website is without a doubt your best marketing tool. It’s often the first interaction that consumers have with your company, and it represents your business and the products or services you sell. For that reason, it’s incredibly important to make sure that your website is up to date and putting its best face forward. Here are a few ways you can make sure that you are making the most of your website.
Boosting SEO
It doesn’t matter what your website looks like or what information it contains if no one can find it. You can boost your SEO to help increase your chances of getting found by consumers. Seventy-one percent of blogs get fewer than 5,000 visitors per month. With some simple tricks, you can rise above that fold.
- Use alt-tags in your images
- Target a keyword and include that in your heading, subheadings and throughout the text
- Link out to reputable sources
- Link back to other blogs on your website
These tips can help you increase your search rankings with Google and other engines.
Improving Design
You want your website to be attractive to potential customers and to make sure that the UX (the User Experience – how people visiting your site experience it) and UI (the User Interface – how the interface of your website appears) is clean and simple. Make sure your site is easy to navigate by having clear headers and tucking information away on different pages so it’s not too overwhelming to read through. Seventy-seven percent of agencies believe that poor website design is a weakness for clients — making it the most significant issue for sites. Thirty-eight percent of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is unattractive.
Optimizing for Mobile
Between December 2013 and December 2015, smartphone internet consumption grew by 78 percent! That means that you’re missing out on a huge part of the market if you haven’t optimized your site for mobile. These days, you need to make sure your website is as slick and easy to navigate on a smartphone as it is on a desktop, because people are searching for and purchasing everything from clothes to movie tickets to hotel rooms online.
Including Contact Information
What you include on your site is crucial as well. Obviously you need to include all the pertinent information that describes your company and what you are selling, but it’s also important to include other details. Forty-four percent of website visitors will leave a company’s website if there’s no contact information or phone number. Make sure to include as much contact information as possible — it will make your company appear more reputable and also give consumers a way to get in touch with you.
Make sure you are getting the most out of your website by making it your number one marketing tool!