Make Your Website More Welcoming To Modern Customers

Are you in the throes of setting up your online business? If so, then you need to focus on building the right website. Building up the right website will help you send the right first impression with your customers. More than 97% of online interactions start with a search engine. Due to this, business owners commonly focus on SEO when marketing their company. They forget about what happens next. SEO is just one half of the puzzle. Once customers find your website, you need to make sure that they convert. This is all down to guaranteeing that your website is welcoming, attractive and enticing. Here are some of the key points that you do need to keep in mind to achieve this goal. 

Speed It Up

First, you need to think about the speed of your website. Research shows that customers don’t want to wait precious minutes for a website to load up these days. Instead, they expect a page to load up immediately without any delays at all. If your page takes more than a couple of seconds to load then your website is already in trouble and won’t be gaining the impact that you hoped for. So, what are some of the issues that can impact the speed of your website? Well, there are a few possibilities to contend with here. The first is the size of files on your website. For instance, you could have large video of photo files on different website pages. If that’s the case, then it could take a while for a page to load, particularly on certain devices. We’ll come back to this point in a second. 

To avoid issues here, you should think about compressing your files. If you do this correctly, then it isn’t going to impact the quality of the media or make your site look cheap in the long term. The other aspect to think about is website hosting. Website hosting is essentially how you use a space online. By hosting your website through the right source, you pay a price to gain more control over the website itself. This can increase the speed and improve the site performance. That’s why if you are having technical issues, then you should start by exploring your hosting solution. 

Don’t forget, your website needs to be fast on virtually every tech device that you can think of. The majority of your website traffic won’t be coming from desktop users these days. Instead, it will mainly be sourced from mobile devices. So, this is what you should be designing your website for. It needs to be responsive and it needs to load rapidly on something like a phone or a tablet. 

Add Great Content 

Next, you should think about content. As Bill Gates said, content is king. Indeed, it’s one of the key ways that you can deliver value to an eager audience. Your content is what keeps customers returning to your site time and time again. The right content can even earn you the critical repeat sale. So, what do you need to think about to ensure that your content is appealing and welcoming?

Well, you need to make sure that it hits the right mark in terms of quality. If you are worried about this, then you can consider hiring a professional content writer to complete the work for you. They can help ensure that your website is constantly filled with content that is engaging, relevant and entertaining for your target audience. 

As well as ensuring that the content does match the right standards of quality, you should also think about ensuring that you are using lots of different types of content. This could include infographics as well as long form text and even video. We’ll discuss video a little more further down. Essentially, you need to make sure that you are taking the opportunity to ensure that your site feels fresh, exciting and unique. That brings us neatly to the next point to keep in mind here.

Think About Design 

You also need to look at the design of your website. This is always going to be a huge part of the first impression that customers receive of your brand. If you are running a small company, then it can be tempting to fall back on using a website template which is understandable. Templates are free so they are always going to be a great way to keep your marketing costs under control. However, they also present significant problems. Since they are free everyone is going to be using the same designs and that can make it seem as though your website has come hot out of a cookie cutter. If your website looks like a copy, then people could make the same type of inference about your brand as a whole. To avoid this, you need to make sure that you instead use the support of a professional designer. They will create a bespoke website that does deliver the level of conversions that you need. 

Don’t be afraid to be a little more bold with your business website design too. It will pay off to think outside of the box and look for opportunities to make your site different from the rest. For instance, you might want to think about adding animations or ensure that the page is interactive. There are many examples of pages like this online that you can take note of. This can help you avoid the horror of a high bounce rate for your website which can kill your brand stone dead online. 

Include A Welcome Video

Since we mentioned the design of the website, it’s also worth thinking about including a welcome video. A welcome video needs to look like a professional piece of content. It can be integrated or separate from the overall design. If it’s separate then it’s going to be easier to update and change as your business continues to grow and evolve. A welcome video will also be useful if the service or product that you are selling is quite complex and needs some level of explanation. 

Let Them Have A Chat

You need to ensure that your business website is engaging. These days, customers want immediate levels of engagement when they interact with a brand online. This is difficult to achieve but tech is providing the answer here. For instance, you could think about integrating a chatbot into your website design. What are chatbots used for? Chatbots provide you with a way to deliver immediate answers to an audience. It can also provide a shortcut for users when they are attempting to navigate your business website, helping with structural issues that might exist which stop customers reaching a sale. 

Think About Structure 

Chatbots are one of the ways that you can skirt around the issue of a poor website structure. But it’s not the complete fix. Ideally, you need to follow the three click rule when setting up the structure of your website. Essentially, this means that customers should never be any more than three clicks away from what they are searching for. 

You might think that this can be achieved by adding links to pages which is technically true. However, if you add the wrong links in poor locations then it will damage the ranking of your site online. Instead you might need to work with a designer to rebuild the structure from the ground up. 

Run A-B Testing 

Finally, you should think about exploring an option like A-B Testing. The reason that a business customer chooses to buy or doesn’t choose to buy can be smaller than you think. A-B testing takes this into account and helps you cater into how the color of a buy button or the font on a page can impact your conversion rates. With A-B testing, you can change or alter a small aspect of your business website and then find out how this changes the way that your customers interact or engage. This can be a tiny difference and it could cause a huge search in conversion rates which is exactly what you need. A skilled marketing solution will handle A-B testing for you and ensure that you get the answers that you need.

Do note that this is different from A-A testing. This is where you run two versions of the site that are exactly the same. This might sound pointless but it will help you identify if there are any technical issues that you need to address before you launch a website on the market. 

We hope this helps you understand some of the key steps that you can take to ensure that your website is more welcoming to customers overall. In doing so, you will be able to achieve the level of conversions that your business deserves on the market. Don’t forget, your website is integral to your brand identity as a whole. If you don’t get the website right from the beginning, then it’s going to be far more difficult to ensure that your brand takes off on the market.