There is no doubt that if you own a business, you must have a website. This is really not something that is up for debate; it’s a simple fact. Even if people prefer to buy in person, they are still likely to check your business and its products and services out online before making that decision. This is true no matter whether you sell expensive, high-end goods or you have everyday items that people need regularly. The point is, having a website gives those customers and potential customers a place to get to know you better.
This is vital when you run a business. There is so much competition that having a website means you stand at least a chance of being noticed. No website at all means you’ll lose a lot of potential business. Plus, when you are able to post interesting content (not necessarily related to selling anything, of course, since content marketing is so important currently), you can prove you are an expert in your field, and people will be more confident spending their money with you.
These and many other reasons mean having a website is important, but remember; just having a website is not enough. You need to ensure people can find it and that when they find it, they spend time on it. Ideally, you’ll want them to spend money if you have an e-commerce store or perhaps share information with their friends and family, so you have more potential customers.
In other words, your website has to be successful in terms of bringing your business to the wider world. In the past, simply creating a website and leaving it as it is without any updates or changes would have been enough. Today that’s nowhere near anything that will help you; it’s just the first step. With that in mind, read on to discover how to make your website – and therefore your business – successful.
Define Your Goals
If you want your website to be successful, it needs to have a goal or goals. This might sound strange; how can a website have a goal? The answer is easy. Perhaps the goal of creating your website was more web presence. Maybe it was to showcase your products in an e-commerce store. It could be that you want to use the site as a platform to write blogs and offer other useful content. Or was it the potential for affiliate links that made you interested in setting up a website?
As you can see, there are actually any number of goals you can consider when it comes to creating a website and the reason behind it, but knowing what your goal is or goals are is crucial before you start. In that way, you can make the site look, feel, and work the right way. An e-commerce store is no good if you don’t add products or have a secure payment gateway. A blog won’t work if the layout is hard to use. Knowing what you want to achieve from your blog will help you plan the appearance and the content and get it right – this means more people will stay on your site for longer, and that’s an important metric to get right.
Choose A Good Domain Name
You can’t launch your website without a domain name, but you can’t rush choosing a name, either. Remember that whatever you choose is what you have to stick with – you can’t change things once you’ve launched. Or rather, you can, but it will be confusing for your customers, and since your website and domain name are going to generally be at the heart of your branding and marketing, it would be a costly endeavor to undertake.
Therefore, take your time at the start and ensure you choose the right domain name. If you have a business name to go along with your website, this is what your domain name should revolve around. That’s because it will be easier for your customers to remember, and, of course, it makes sense. Having a domain name that is the same as your business name is a simple and easy choice to make.
If your domain name has already been taken, you might want to consider choosing an alternative business name, assuming it’s not too late to do so. Your website domain name really is that important; it should come first.
If you don’t have a business because you’re starting a personal blog or you haven’t yet chosen the name of your business, you’ll have a lot more choice when it comes to your domain name, but you still need to think about it carefully and sensibly. It will have to be easy to remember (even more so if there is no business to go alongside it), easy to spell, and it should also be short – the best domain names have fewer than fourteen characters. Don’t add numbers or special characters unless it’s absolutely necessary because these can be confusing and will often lead to potential visitors spelling your domain name wrong and going to the wrong site.
They might notice their error immediately and try again, but if the site they have landed on gives them what they are looking for, it’s a lot less likely that this will happen. Not only will you lose customers, but the wrong domain name could even drive them into the arms of your competition.
Make Your Site Mobile Responsive
Current figures suggest that over the course of a day, an adult will spend around three hours on their phone. This will be a combination of work and leisure time, but no matter what the reason might be, it’s an important point to note. People are using their phones more than they are using other devices, and that includes their laptops or desktop computers. Therefore, with so many people being online via a mobile device, it makes a lot of sense for your website to be mobile responsive. This means that visitors can use the site as easily as if they were on a laptop, and the site looks good too.
If you don’t think this is an issue, consider any time you might have been browsing online on your phone. If you came across a website that didn’t look good on your phone, that you couldn’t read properly, and on which you found it all but impossible to navigate to where you wanted to go, would you keep trying? Or would you, as most people would, choose a different site? The fact that most people won’t wait until they get home to look at the bad site on a different device and would rather find a different mobile responsive one should tell you a lot – and it should certainly tell you that you need to look into how good your website will look on all devices.
It’s also worth considering that if people don’t stay on your site for very long, this will go against you in terms of where you rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The longer someone stays, the more this proves the content on your site is valuable, and Google will therefore rank it accordingly – higher up in the results. If people go to your site for a few seconds before leaving again, this will show Google that you don’t have any useful content, and you won’t rank as highly as sites that do. It might not seem like much, but when everything is added together, this could make a big difference.
Use The Best SEO Practices
The best website in the world won’t do you any good if nobody can find it. While paid advertising might bring visitors to your site, free organic search traffic is more efficient and successful over time.
People typically use search engines like Google to find what they’re looking for when researching something online. You need to make sure your website is included in the results on the first page of Google if possible, as only a handful of people click through beyond that – they’ll try a different search term instead. This is not always easy to do, but with the right SEO practices in place, it can be done. To improve your website’s position in search engine results, you need to learn how search engines like Google employ complex algorithms to evaluate a page’s relevance to a user’s query.
Crawling, indexing, and ranking are the three processes utilized by search engines to decide the placement of your listing. Crawling is very important, as it means people discover your site by following links from other sites. This is why you need to create as many backlinks to your site as possible on other websites. Again, this is not easy, but with the help of specialist link builders for e-commerce websites or specialists in whatever else your website needs to do, it’s possible to improve your ranking considerably.
When the crawling bots find your site, they’ll index it, which means they’ll examine it for things like keywords, age, relevancy, links, and media. Get plenty of fresh, relevant material up on your site that is associated with the keywords you want to rank for.
Finally, search engines use rankings to select the most relevant results for a user’s query. Relevance and authority are used to determine placement. Include a lot of useful material, like several articles covering various facets of the topic. Your website’s authority is determined by its size, its traffic, and the number of reputable websites that connect to it. Using SEO tools for small businesses, you can easily optimize your site and make it highly successful.
