By now you should know that your website is one of the most significant assets your business has to hand, working as a powerful marketing, sales and lead generation tool and something that shouldn’t be forgotten about or left to fall into disrepair.
A decline in sales and leads could be due to many different factors, however it’s important to remember that one of the biggest reasons for a lack of business is down to a poorly optimised, outdated or barely functional website.
You only have a matter of seconds to make the best first impression to your website visitors and with people only reading around 20% of the text content on a website page, if your website doesn’t show off your message clearly at first glance, then it’s unlikely your customers will be willing to continue to browse your site.
While many experts will tell you that you need to increase your traffic or improve your design, let’s focus on how exactly we can do that. With these actionable and effective tips for improving your website you can be showing off a well designed, optimised and ultimately measurable website that can be benefiting your business for years to come.
Ways To Improve Your Website
While results do vary from business to business, there are still a number of ways you can improve your website no matter what you’re looking to achieve or what industry you work within. Here’s a run down of 10 of the most effective ways you can optimise your website in order to boost your business.
Website Navigation
Your website navigation serves two very important purposes, the first being to help your audience find what it is they are looking for on your website and the other being in order to help search engine robots index your website within rankings. By using descriptive navigation text you can use words that your audience can relate to, as well as use words that are likely to be keywords that your visitors are looking for within Google.
Call To Action Text
Your call to action text is hugely important for your business, acting as an important tool for grabbing your audiences attention and encouraging them to find out more about your products and services or even encouraging them to buy your products. By including large, engaging call to actions and including them within your website headers, your CTAs are the first thing your audience see and can be captivated from the second they view your site.
Run User Testing With Your Main Functions
There are many people out there who don’t take user testing seriously or find it an intimidating task, thinking it requires thousands of pounds and expensive analytics tools in order to do so. With tools such as Google analytics or even your own built in website tracking services you can run tests on ordering your products, contact forms and search features in order to make sure these important website functions are working correctly, in order to offer the best experience.
Fix Browser Issues
Imagine if your customers weren’t able to view your website on specific platform or browser, that’s a huge amount of your audience who could be missing out on your products and services, which is why you need to spend time resolving any browser issues you may have. By testing for any bugs such as elements of the page not showing on certain browsers or even your entire website not working on specific platforms, you can work out what is going wrong and correct browser specific problems.
Mobile Friendly
By now you should know that a mobile friendly website is a must have, with Google even prioritising mobile websites and mobile rankings over non responsive sites. In order to offer your audience a great experience it’s important that everyone can view your website, no matter what device they happen to be on, being sure to offer the same service to everyone and not looking to prioritise desktop users only. If you want to improve your website massively in one simple step, make sure it’s responsive!
While it might seem overwhelming, by starting with these simple tips you can start improving your website in no time, offering you new opportunities for your business to increase sales and boost leads, as well as having an impact on your website traffic, bounce rate and all round conversions.
If you’re looking to find out more about optimising your website for success, why not speak to us today?
