Think about how often we visit a website over the course of a single day. Whether it’s research for work or looking up restaurants, stores, or other services online for personal reasons, we probably visit over fifteen to twenty websites every day. The 12 billion searches we do per month on the web in the United States invariably lead to a click on a website to find out more. As a business owner, you want your website to stand out and attract customers to it. Aspects like including high quality content, having good keyword rankings, being mobile friendly, and having a generally good web design are all good steps towards that goal. So how can you achieve all of these things? What other things should you keep in mind after building your website?
 
How Do I Make My Website Show Up On Internet Searches?
The top way your website is going to turn up in the first pages of a search result is to have excellent SEO (search engine optimization). With high quality content that’s regularly updated and timely, and the help of an SEO firm, you’ll see your search engine rankings fly up in now time. Focusing on keyword research, indexing, and metadata can all assist these efforts.
 
Pay-per-click advertising (also known as PPC advertising), link building, and other driven marketing campaigns can also help.
 
What Other Features Might Make My Web Design More Appealing?
Ideally, you want your website design to be image-driven at first site, with a clear layout of where users can find other pertinent information. You generally have about 10 seconds to make an impression and let customers know what they’ll get out of your company and website. Users read less than 30% of the written content on a web page, so you want to keep things short and to the point.
 
Research has shown that users do prefer content provided in a visual format; online content video views now get over 50 billion views per month. Additionally, bullet point lists are also a good way to get information across quickly — 70% of people looked at bullet point lists, versus just 55% who read non-bulleted lists.
 
Given that four-fifths of consumers do at least some of their shopping and research on smartphones, it’s important that your web design be mobile friendly. Indeed, almost half of users said that if they reached a business site that didn’t have a mobile friendly web design, they assumed the business simply didn’t care and would seek another business out.
 
Over half of all mobile searches are done with the aim of finding a local result and over 60% of these searches wind up resulting in the consumer buying something. If your web design isn’t mobile friendly, you could be losing out big time on those sales.
 
What Should I Keep In Mind After Building My Website?
If you’re running an online retail store, where money is being exchanged, you’re going to want to make sure that your website is safe and figure out methods to keep your website from being hacked. Even if you’re a smaller business, hackers will still take advantage if they happen to stumble across your website and think they can get some money from it. It might be worth it to hire IT professionals who can advise you on security measures.
 
Make sure that your website is kept up to date with changes. If your hours change seasonally, you get a new phone line, or are offering special or extra services, those should be noted on the website. Customers are going to most likely head to the website first to find the most current information and can get upset if the information they receive is out of date.
 
Your web presence should reflect the brand or service you’re trying to offer — think of it as a wider extension of any physical presence you have. What do you want your website to say about your company?
 
Having a good website that effectively promotes your business is completely necessary in today’s new digital age.