In today's digital age, having a website for your business is essential. Your website serves as more than a billboard it's a 24/7 automated selling tool, and it can be the deciding factor in whether potential customers choose to enlist your services. If you're a small business without a fully-staffed marketing team, then here are 7 crucial tips to help boost the visibility and efficacy of your website.
1. Know your target audience
The most important step to starting out for any business is understanding who your target audience is. Without this foundational piece of information, it can become challenging to know how to market your services (let alone design your website) in such a way that meets their needs and expectations.
Questions to consider
Your website's design, content, and calls-to-action should all be tailored to resonate with your target audience. Therefore, one must ask themselves the following:
Who is my target audience? What are their demographics, pain points, and goals?
How can I reach them? Are there specific directories that they check for the services that my business offers? Which social media platforms do they use?
What are their search habits? What keywords or keyword phrases do they use to find businesses like mine?
Once these questions have been answered, you will more aptly be able to determine a compelling brand message that explains your business's unique value propositions, its mission and values, etc.
2. Maximize visibility
One of the easiest and most effective ways of boosting your business's visibility is by optimizing your business profiles online. One predominant exmaple is your Google My Business profile. Not only does Google My Business help potential customers find your business in local searches, but it also allows you to display essential information such as your location, business hours, contact details, and more importantly a website link for additonal details on the services you provide as well as why you're the best fit for the job.
Another factor to consider is that Google My Business is a powerful tool for improving local SEO. It ensures that your business appears in local search results when a relevant keyword is queried, such as "web designer in [city name]."
3. User-friendly web design
Creating a website is more than just diving into a CMS (e.g. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, etc.), selecting a template, and plugging & playing content. User experience (UX) plays a significant role in how visitors interact with your brand and your website. If a user has difficulty finding what they need, they are likely to leave and look elsewhere. Creating a user-friendly website involves more than making it look good—it's about making the user journey as smooth and intuitive as possible. Keeping important information easily accessible and reducing cognitive load can greatly affect whether a customer chooses to do business with you.
In this day and age, more people than ever operate directly from their smart phones, highlighting the importance of taking a mobile-first approach to design. Ensuring that these users in particular are served with a website that is responsive in both looks and functionality. However, regardless of device type a well-designed website keeps users engaged and encourages them to explore more of your content. As a result, search engines will notice this and rank your content as being more valuable.
One final but crucial detail that is often overlooked as part of a website's user experience is branding. Maintaining a consistent appearance between your website and the visual expressions of your business's social media profiles, sales & marketing materials, etc. provides customers with a cohesive experience overall and affords them the capacity to build trust with your brand.
4. Focus on organic traffic
Prospecting can be a chore when the majority, if not 100%, of it happens through your approaching those in need of your services, rather than the other way around. Direct traffic to a business's website is great. It means that people are visiting it after you've given the URL to them. But what's better is when people can find you without ever having heard of you, shaken your hand, or been handed a business card.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical part of increasing your website’s visibility in search engine results. SEO helps your website appear in relevant search results, driving organic (non-paid) traffic to your site. Higher search engine rankings lead to more website visitors, which can ultimately increase conversions and sales. Additionally, focusing on both on-page SEO (e.g. optimizing your site’s content) and off-page SEO (e.g. building backlinks) can help you build authority in your industry.
The most fundamental part of SEO begins with keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your audience is searching for. Use these keywords naturally throughout your website, including in blog posts, product descriptions, image alt text, and meta tags. Don’t forget to also optimize for local SEO if you’re targeting customers in specific regions.
Caution: an overabundance of the same keyword can negatively affect your website's rankings as search engines may likely flag it as spam, and it's usually best to consult an expert.
5. Leverage content marketing to establish thought leadership
Content marketing is a powerful tool for building trust with your audience by establishing your business as a thought leader in your industry. By consistently publishing informative, helpful, and valuable content, you can position yourself as an expert and resource in your field, attracting more visitors to your website—quality content that provides answers to your audience's questions can drive organic traffic.
Start by creating a blog or resource section on your website where you can publish articles, case studies, how-to guides, or industry news. Focus on content that educates or solves common problems for your target audience. Use a combination of formats, including written posts, videos, and infographics, to engage different types of learners.
6. Harness the power of analytics
Website analytics, such as Google Analytics, are crucial tools for understanding the behavior of visitors on a website. By tracking user activity, such as page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates, these analytics provide valuable insights into how well a website is performing. This data allows website owners to see which pages are most popular, where visitors are coming from, and how they are interacting with the site. With this information, businesses can identify areas that need improvement, optimize user experience, and make data-driven decisions to enhance website performance.
Moreover, website analytics help to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. For example, Google Analytics can track traffic sources, allowing businesses to determine which marketing channels (such as social media, email marketing, or paid ads) are driving the most visitors. This enables businesses to allocate their resources more effectively and refine their marketing strategies to reach their target audience more efficiently. Additionally, analytics can provide valuable insights into user demographics and interests, allowing for more personalized and relevant content, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. Ultimately, website analytics offer businesses the tools to refine their approach, boost online presence, and increase revenue.
7. Optimize for page speed
Unbeknownst to most non-marketers, Google introduced Core Web Vitals as part of a new search results ranking criteria in May 2021. The Core Web Virtals metrics include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long it takes to render the largest content element on the page, typically an image or video.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): The amount of time between when a user initiates any interaction (e.g. click, tap, etc.) and when the page responds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures the time and number of unexpected layout shifts within the viewport as a page loads.
The better a webpage performs in adherence to the aforementioned metrics, the better user experience it serves; and therefore the higher Google ranks it. As such, it's no longer good enough to just have a keyword-rich content on your webpages. Additionally, research has shown that websites that load in 1 second can have conversion rates as much as 3 times higher than one that loads in 5 seconds.
How do I improve my website's page speed performance?
Much like all things in web, there is not one clear-cut answer to this question. Instead, it all depends on various details that play into the bigger picture of whether your site loads slow, fast, or somewhere in between. To improve page speed, try addressing the following items that include but are limited to:
- Compress images: Large, uncompressed images are one of the most common offenders for slow pageload times. By using image compression tools such as TinyJPG, you can reduce file sizes without sacrificing too much in image quality.
- Image format: We've all heard of JPGs and PNGs, but consider using a modern image format like WebP, which offer much smaller file sizes. In the case of non-photographic images such as logos and icons, SVGs can be leveraged to save your users bandwidth.
- Lazy load images: Using the
loading="lazy"attribute onimgtags can help free up space for other, more mission-critical resources to load first. However lazy loading should only be used for content that is below the fold, otherwise you will encounter issues with CLS. - Minify HTML, CSS & JavaScript files: Minifying code involves the removal of code comments, whitespace, and unnecessary characters such as semicolons at the end of declared values. Although minification usually never sees dramatic shifts in performance, it is still best practice.
- Reduce HTTP requests: Websites in general pull in a plethora of assets to render a page, such as images, fonts, stylesheets, and scripts. See if there are ways to consolidate or reduces assets on a per-page basis so that requests are kept to a minimum.
Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can be vital in helping you assess your website's pageload times and provide actionable recommendations for improvement.
I've done everything I can but my website still loads slowly. What should I do?
For many years now, web developers have been trying crack this code. Although progress has been made on these grounds, many still fail to achieve the results they are hoping to see. One of the biggest reasons for slower load times is the result of Content Management System (CMS) reliance. While platforms like WordPress (among others) can be advantageous for those seeking to launch a website without the aid of a web professional, they also come packed with endless bloat to help cater to everyone their platforms.
How kthus designs helps improve page speed performance
At kthus designs, we design and build the websites that will outspeed those of your competition. Instead of leaning heavily into the use of a CMS, we handwrite every single line of code so that zero waste is left to drag down the performance of your site.
Don't believe us? Run a page speed test and see it for yourself.
For personal websites and small businesses, we offer low-cost plans to design, build, and manage your site. Get started with kthus designs today so that you can focus on running your business and not your website.