8 Secrets of a Successful Website
Want your website to be a roaring success? Here are 8 surefire ways to ensure your website performs at its best.
1. Effective planning
Proper planning is a major factor in the success of your website. A well-planned website will take less time to build, cost less money, and give you a bigger return on your investment. Ask yourself these questions:
Why do I need a website?
Gain more customers? Save money and time? Increase sales?
Why do my customers need a new website?
Don't forget your customers' needs - in many ways, you're building a new site for them!
What are my goals?
A 70% decrease in printing costs? A 40% reduction in phone calls to the office for information? A 100% increase in sales?
Be specific. Be realistic. Aim high.
What's my budget?
Be realistic about this. Spending more will undoubtedly increase chances of success, but a good web designer will be able to creatively maximise a clearly defined smaller budget. Ultimately, you want a return on your investment, but be upfront about what you'd like to spend.
What features does the website need?
Don't lose sight of your customers' needs or your own goals in deciding the features you'll need to achieve success.
2. Usability
You have a clear idea of what you want your customers to do - make it easy for them to do it!
Visitors should easily be able to find the information they're looking for. Make sure the pages load as quickly as possible too - slow-loading or confusing web pages lead to frustrated customers who bail out, never to return.
Aim for clarity, speed and simplicity. The result will be happier customers, repeat visits and increased sales - sounds like success to us!
3. Credibility, trust and conversion
One clear measure of the success of any website is its conversion rate. Quite simply, if your website persuades a visitor to buy a product, or make an enquiry (or whatever your ultimate goal is for your visitors), you've successfully 'converted' that visitor.
To convert any visitor, you have to prove your credibility to that visitor and gain their trust in your offering. That's easy offline - your potential customers only have to speak to you or visit you to make that judgement.
Understandably, it's much harder to convince potential customers of your credibility via a website, so it's crucial that you appear credible and trustworthy.
There are countless ways of increasing trust and credibility on the web. Some ideas are:
- Display testimonials from previous happy customers
- Ensure your site looks modern, clean and professional, with no spelling mistakes or bad links
- Include photos and profiles of your staff
- Offer solid money back guarantees
- Write in an open, friendly, direct way
- Have a friendly call-to-action, encouraging contact
- Display prices clearly
- Show detailed case studies of past successes
4. Engaging Content
Possibly the most important ingredient of a successful website is compelling, regularly-updated content. Keeping your website up-to-date with fresh, relevant new content gives visitors a reason to visit - and keep visiting over and over again.
What's more, a regular stream of interesting, newly-updated content will most certainly enhance your search engine rankings too. Search engines favour websites with regularly updated content, and more people will be likely to link to your site if you have new things to say, which in turn bumps up your search engine score.
Try including news stories, articles, new products, a message board or forum. Include an RSS feed to allow others to syndicate and subscribe to your content, or send regular email newsletters to subscribers to encourage them to come back for more.
5. Search engines
80% of any website's visitors will likely come from a search engine, so it's absolutely vital that you rank well for search terms relevant to your business. Particularly, you must rate highly for the actual search terms that potential visitors will be using to find you.
Thousands of people most definitely are searching right now for what you have to offer. The success of your website depends on ensuring your site is visible in their search results.
Read more about the basics of search engine success.
6. Marketing
People often mistakenly think that successful websites don't need marketing. Surely, if we simply build it the visitors will come? Not exactly. Highly successful websites still require a great deal of marketing, both online and off.
However, you certainly won't need to book full page adverts in the glossy magazines - really effective marketing can definitely be undertaken on a budget.
Offline don't forget the obvious:
- put your website address on every piece of written and printed communication you create - business cards, letterheads, direct mail, company vehicles, invoices, email signatures, etc.
- Verbally spread the word amongst friends and colleagues.
- Speaking or writing about your business at trade conferences or in industry magazines is a great way to give your website and business profile a huge boost. Give it a try!
Online the opportunites are enormous!
- Vast parts of your online marketing efforts will come from the search engines, so it goes without saying that you need to ensure your organic search rankings are good.
- Carefully consider paying for more targeted search advertising, like PPC (Pay Per Click) in the form of Google AdWords.
- Social media and user-generated content are the buzzwords of the web at the moment - use them to your advantage in marketing your site. From placing Flickr photos onto your site, to publicising and listing your events on Upcoming, integrating your site with other sites in the wider web will help your customers and may also improve your search engine visibility into the bargain!
- Plus, don't forget press releases; email newsletters; listings in free web directories… we've barely scratched the surface!
7. Repeat visitors
Repeat visitors are like gold, and are crucial to the success of your business on the web. Studies show that it takes a potential customer up to 7 visits before they finally decide to buy from you, so it's vitally important to encourage frequent repeat visitors.
More importantly, it's far easier to convince a repeat customer than convert a brand-new visitor, thus decreasing the time and money you need to spend in persuading them to buy from you.
How do you get repeat visitors? Get creative!
- Host a forum or message board
- Send targeted, regular email newsletters to interested customers
- Write fresh new content on a regular basis
- Write a regular blog to demonstrate your passion and expertise in your field
- Hold a competition
- Publish an RSS feed to encourage visitors to subscribe to new content
8. Measurement and metrics
Objectively measuring and analysing your website efforts are crucial to the ongoing success of your website. This is nowhere near as complicated and daunting as it seems!
Measure/monitor performance
Install a 'visitor statistics package' to find out what pages of your website are the most popular, where people are coming from, how they found your website, and more. Your web designer will help you choose one to suit your needs and budget - you may even use more than one in combination!
Don't forget also to monitor comments you receive from customers. If you have a 'search this site' box on your site, collect a list of the search terms visitors are typing in - if plenty of visitors are searching your site for 'ABC Widgets', it's pretty clear that people are having trouble finding information about your ABC Widgets!
Analyse the results
Regularly scrutinise the data from the stats package to spot trends, spy opportunities, or see where people may be having difficulties. Do visitors typically bail out before reaching your checkout page? Find out why!
Further, if you send regular email newsletters, analyse the performance of your email campaigns too with the email campaign reporting package your web designer should provide.
Adjust accordingly
By now you should have spotted the bottlenecks or roadblocks in your site that may be stopping visitors from reaching the desired goals. Make adjustments to your site accordingly.
Repeat!
Repeat the whole process again and again. Regular monitoring, analysis and adjustment will undoubtedly have an enormous impact on the continued success of your website.
What next?
Don’t hesitate to contact us today to discuss how we could work with you to help make a roaring success of your website.
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