A website helps your business reach a wider audience and establish credibility. When used properly, your business website is a powerful digital marketing tool that enables you to build brand awareness. Discover the elements of a strong business website below.
1. A Simple Design
You have many elements to work with when you build a business website: colors, fonts, GIFs, videos, and text. However, a cluttered website distracts visitors from your company’s core product or service.
A simple design that helps users quickly scan the essential information makes you stand out from competitors. Limit the bells and whistles, shorten the paragraphs, and use simple sentence structure to attract traffic.
2. Easy Navigation
When visitors easily navigate your website, they stick around for longer as they learn more about your brand and browse your product and services. The top of your website should feature a search bar and a navigation menu that clearly organizes tabs and pages.
Most importantly, a user must be able to quickly return to the homepage, no matter where they land on the website. User design (UX) is an entire discipline by itself, and you should consult a digital marketing agency for the best results.
3. Business Information
Your website should have relevant business information that helps visitors contact your company or visit your premises. You can place the contact information above the homepage and give users multiple options, such as telephone, email, social media, or a contact form.
The homepage should also summarize your business and include brief descriptions of your products and services. Include ways to join your mailing list so people can keep up with your business updates until they are ready to purchase your offerings.
4. Mobile-Optimized
Most website visitors use phones, and you want your site optimized for mobile navigation. A responsive design that detects the screen resolution of different devices and optimizes function accordingly is the best way to cater to smartphone visitors. This design also delivers a consistent user experience, regardless of which device your visitors use.
5. Fast Loading Speed
Website visitors are more likely to abandon a slow-loading page entirely, which affects your conversion and engagement rates and revenue. If your website has high bounce rates, evaluate the speed to determine if its frustrating page navigators. A slow loading speed can indicate that your website host cannot handle high bandwidth demands or the software is outdated.
6. Fresh, High-Quality Content
Outdated and poor content can ruin a well-designed website, so invest in content creation. You want to provide different forms of compelling content to keep readers on your site.
Written content include blogs, case studies, white papers, testimonials, and industry reports, while graphic content include infographics, images, and data visualizations. Lastly, you can also include how-to-videos and music to excite audiences. Update the content regularly to keep visitors coming back to your business website.
7. Social Media Sharing Features
Your website visitors will likely want to share interesting content with their social media followers. Add social media buttons to encourage readers to share content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. You can also add like and follow buttons that allow visitors to find your social media pages and engage with your feeds.
8. Call to Action
Every page on your business site should have a call to action, whether you want visitors to request a quote, schedule an appointment, download a white paper, subscribe to a newsletter, or buy a product.
The call to action should be prominently displayed above the fold and provide a visible action to help visitors take action, such as a button, form, or link. In this way, your website is optimized for conversion, and you can engage more meaningfully with the traffic.
As seen above, many factors go into designing an effective business website, and many business owners lack the time and resources for website optimization. Luckily, Grow Team can match you with a top-performing digital marketing firm and give you the results you want. Contact us today to get started.