For any business, your website is one of the most important tools in showcasing your services and giving customers a taste of what to expect from working with you.
That said, you may not be making the most of this valuable asset and, in some cases, bad user experience from a poorly designed and optimised website could actually be costing you leads.
Doing something about this should therefore be a top priority, so here are some essential elements to check to ensure your site is performing at its best.
The look and performance of your website is of paramount importance when it comes to driving sales. If your site is slow to load pages, has unwieldy or confusing navigation and looks like it was last updated in the 1990s then it could be costing you business.
According to Google, if your page load time exceeds three seconds you run a considerable risk of alienating your audience and any potential customers simply clicking away to another site. At the same time, if the structure of your website is not intuitive and clearly set out – such as having too many options, submenus or internal links – this too can be a real turn off for viewers.
A key trend of the last 12 months has been the significant rise in importance of video content. Embedding video into your site can help you to explain complex or difficult aspects of your service in a clearer, more easily digestible manner.
Indeed, research from Forrester has shown that the typical person can absorb and retain far more information from visual content than via the written word – up to 90 per cent for visual content compared to just ten per cent from written text. It also enables you to present information in an eye catching and interesting manner, helping to drive home the message that you’re a dynamic enterprise that potential customers will want to work with.
It’s all well and good attracting people to your website and them having a great experience while exploring it, but if you have no way to capture the information of potential customers you could be missing out on a significant amount of extra business.
Creating gated hero assets that offer solutions to some of the common issues your target customers face and asking users to input their contact details in order to access them can be a good place to start. You might also like to ask viewers to sign up to a weekly/monthly newsletter that highlights your skill in your sector and gives value to those who register for regular contact.
Showing you have the finger on the pulse of your industry is paramount when it comes to instilling confidence in visitors to your website. One of the best ways to achieve this is to have a blog with regularly updated content.
Good blog content can showcase your expertise in tackling common issues faced by your customers. A well-designed, populated blog can also prove crucial in boosting your search ranking, as offering more pages of content that is relevant to your target audience will have a positive impact on SEO.
Finally, more and more people are making use of the latest smartphones. As a result, if your website is not optimised to be viewed on mobile then you could be alienating a significant proportion of your potential customers.
Figures from Statista show that 94 per cent of adults in the UK own a mobile phone, with the vast majority connected to the internet and viewing online content via these devices. As a result, if your website isn’t optimised to perform seamlessly on mobile, this represents a huge opportunity to connect with potential customers that you could be missing out on.
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