Most people go looking for answers online to help them decide which products and services to purchase. If you don’t have a website, customers can’t find you, and your competitors with websites may have an advantage over you. Also, a website can build your brand’s credibility and visibility, especially if it’s optimized for search engines.

Before a customer can start navigating your website, the first impression of your brand is formed by what they see. Since the first glance counts, not just any website will work.  So, if you want to be competitive and succeed in the modern marketplace, you should consider a professional website that reflects your brand effectively. 

Here’s how you can create a website that can boost your brand, build credibility and trust, and increase your bottom line.

Research And Analysis

Any good business tool should begin with solid research. It’s recommended to study and know your customers, competitors, and brand’s niche and how they all fit your brand. The research will give you direction and save you time during the actual creation of the website. The clue here is to start with your target customer and build from there.

• Your target customers: Start by defining who your target audience is, what they want, and the information you want them to have about your brand. Put yourself in their shoes and list everything you would want to know if you visited the website.
• Your competitors: It’s important to consider your competition so that your website can offer a better customer experience. Check where they fall short so that yours can cover the issues they haven’t. Also, consider the competitors’ helpful features that you can potentially incorporate into yours. Let your website give customers a reason to purchase from you and not your competitors.
• Your niche: Your website should be reflective of your brand’s industry. Make it easy for customers and visitors to connect your website to a particular niche without any difficulty.

The most important thing is to ensure that the three key points above merge and fit into your brand. Reviewing your tag lines, logo, and related images, as well as for deciding whether you want a formal or casual tone for your website are good places to start. 

Also, deciding if you need to hire a web designer or to use templates and blocks from website building services is key. If you decide on website builders, ensure to make comparisons such as squarespace vs. wix to know which one works best for you.

Reviewing Everything Together

By this stage, you should know of your target audience, your competitors, and how your website should relate to your brand. 

During the review, you should: 

• Have a defined brand personality that tells the customer something about your brand that resonates with them and the industry that you are in.
• Decide what you must include on the website and what you should let go of.
• Ensure that the images speak clearly to your target audience, bring power to your brand, and tell customers why they should choose you over your competitors.
• Ensure you have something valuable to offer your customers, that other websites may not.

Keep reviewing and revising until everything fits properly, is in tune with the brand, and unique in comparison to other companies.  

Creating The Actual Website

This is where it now comes together. It’s important to keep your brand identity in mind when creating the actual site. Below are the components to consider when creating a website that meets customers’ expectations while giving your brand power.

• Content: What you say and how you present it on your website is important. Ensure to match the images with the relevant content. It should be valuable and help the customers understand your brand, the products and services you offer. Always incorporate the best keywords that customers are likely to use when searching for products or services in your niche.
• Navigation: Don’t make it hard for customers to find their way around your website. Simplify their search with simple navigation without having to go through a long process to find what they’re looking for.
• Design: The site needs to be appealing to the eye. The images, colors, illustrations should all complement each other. Your website indirectly teaches your customers about the brand. Create a balance between appearance and practicality. The design should also reflect your brand’s industry.
• Optimize your site: To be found easily on search engines, you need to optimize your website content and structure. This is the assured way to appear on search engines. If the site is optimized correctly, you can appear among the top search results. This is where you want your website to be so that your customers can find it.
• Call for Action: After doing your best to create an attractive, practical, and functional website, encourage your visitors to act. After all, the reason you want to power your brand through the website is to generate sales. Ask them to play their part and buy or share the information.

Keep Updating

After your website is up and running, don’t stop there. A website is a work in progress. Technology, graphics, and design continually change, and so should your website. Only a few years ago, a website didn’t need to be mobile friendly but today it’s a necessity. Also, make regular updates to the content to keep it current and reflective of any changes in your business from time to time.

A website should continue growing as the business and the brand grows. The most unfortunate thing for your brand would be being associated with dormancy. Regular blog posts are an excellent way to show your customers you’re still active. New information is attractive to clients and search engines as well. 

A Website For Brand Power

A website holds great potential for empowering your brand. It can reach audiences that other business tools may not and empower your brand by placing it in the limelight. It also holds the power to increase your business’s bottom line, besides working for you 24/7. 

No matter your business’s size, you can have a professional website that can improve your brand’s power over your competitors and for improved interaction with your customers.

If you want to start a business today, taking advantage of the web is absolutely necessary. Whether you are a small company or big, the potential of leveraging the business through internet is unlimited.

Nowadays, most businesses use the digital environment for various reasons:

• Branding
• Advertising & Marketing
• Relationships with Customers
• Sales
• Communication
• Logistics and Strategy Planning

These are the most common. But, there are way more other reasons to go online with your business.

As you already know, every business welcomes its prospects on their professional website. Basically, your website is the place where you receive the guests.

This involves making them feel comfortable, offering them a tea (incentive for leads), and ultimately negotiating a trade-off.

The unfortunate truth is that a lot of websites aren’t that “welcoming”. This represents a huge issue. Websites that contain lots of bugs, those that are poorly made, and those that don’t inspire professionalism…these are all huge turn-offs for your possible customers.

You might be an exceptional businessman and you might have the best business. But –you might lack web design and development skills. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Here is what’s wrong, though: the present state of your website might be damaged – and that will contribute to the productivity and functionality of your business.

In order to avoid problems that come strictly from your website, you need to pay attention to different mistakes and bad practices. During today’s post, we’ll talk about few of them. Pay close attention and fix everything as soon as you possibly can.

1. Suddenly Updating Your Website to Something New

Updating your website is fine…as long as you do it slowly and carefully. When you update your website, you’re making a change because you believe it’ll make your business more productive.

Unfortunately, some changes can totally damage your business.

For instance, if you decide to totally change your website design, structure, and colors, you’re doing a big mistake. The present followers of your business already have a notion of what your brand signifies.

Your brand will start losing its credibility and trust. Therefore, you’ll lose a significant part of your customers.
Some websites even change their URL links without announcing their prospects what the new link’s going to be. If you want to change URL, make sure that you notify everyone before the change. Also, create 301 redirects and have your last URL lead to the newest.

2. Low-Speed Page Loading

Low-speed page loading is the most annoying thing. This doesn’t apply only to customers – it applies to every contemporary internet user. You see, most websites work fine. The pages load fast, you get where you want to get instantly, and that’s it: you have a good user experience.

Now. In case your website’s pages are loading really slowly, you’re most likely to annoy every visitor of yours. Time, attention, and patience are extremely limited resources nowadays. You can’t expect someone to enjoy your “home” if they have to wait 5 seconds before making every new footstep.

Loading speed is also an influencing factor for search engine rankings. Google definitely values the loading speed of a website and considers it a big bonus (or a big turn-off) while selecting the rankings within the SERPS.

3. Not Using Website Analytics

If your main source of customers comes from your business website, not taking advantage of analytics could turn out to be damaging. You get the numbers, you get the conversions, and you even get some sales…but is that enough?

When you lead a professional business, and you’re also leveraging the digital environment to maintain your activity, you must know what your website visitors do.

You must know what articles they read the most, what pages of your website are most frequently visited, and where your traffic comes from. There are plenty of efficient website analytics tools across the marketplace – check them out here.

If you keep track of these factors, you’ll begin to understand and spot the liabilities of your website. When you found them, you can change them. Therefore, using analytics keeps you up to speed with your website’s performance.

4. The Website Isn’t Optimized for Mobile

Did you know that since 2015, mobile use has become the most frequently used way of browsing the internet? That should give you a clue about how your customers find you.

Even thought these statistics aren’t secret, many websites fail to optimize their websites for mobile devices. This mistake can lead to so much loss of potential, as everyone who finds you through a mobile phone won’t be able to see what you have to offer.
In order to avoid that, make sure that your pages are responsive and mobile optimized. Without this, you have no chance to become the best in your niche.

5. The Lack of a Content Strategy

Lastly, but most importantly, websites that lack a content strategy will often fail to impress. Content is king nowadays, and your website definitely needs it in order to thrive.

Alex Morgan, Content Manager at TopAussieWriters, has implemented an impressive content marketing strategy for his company. He took 15 of the most common essay problems that contemporary students have, and created a content strategy plan around them.

The content marketing team has managed to come up with 15 comprehensive guides on how to solve those issues. They have given them for free. Instead of losing their business service (essay writing) – and that’s might be because they’ve already solved the issues – the orders number began to rise.

They have managed to create value, and that value rewarded them with sales. You need to create your own content strategy for your own business. Deliver educational material to your audience, and do it through your website.

Conclusion

Website functionality keeps proving to be an essential factor for contemporary business success. If your website serves promotion purposes, then it’s absolutely critical to develop it properly. If you don’t you’re losing a lot of potential!

Start using these tips if they apply to you, and continue your search on this topic. Always keep track of your analytics and always be up to speed with what’s going on with your traffic. By constantly analyzing and optimizing, you’re going to keep the progress up and running.

Bio

Lisa Wheatly believes analytical thinking and an enquiring mind are her strongest points, and she does her best to put them to good use. Lisa has had an experience in opening couple business. Besides, nowadays Lisa is a consultant of young entrepreneurs, and she feels that her knowledge of the human mind allows her to accurately assess the abilities of the young businessmen.

Google recently had a chance to sit down with the Global Creative Director for Epson to discuss various important elements a website should have to be successful and convert customers.

Here is a quick break down of some of the things he recommends people focus on when building a company website.

• Build your website for the customer not the search engines.
• Have a clear call to action to generate conversions.
• Keep it simple and don’t over complicate.
• Maintain an active blog so your business can be social.
• Quality content curation is vital.
• Be active on social networks.

Watch the whole video below or visit YouTube.