Want a website that generates you leads?
Looking to see success from your website?
Website success doesn’t happen by accident, it takes work, strategy and the right ingredients.
When you bake a cake, you will look at the recipe and it will tell you what ingredients are needed and how much of each ingredient is required. If you get the amounts wrong or miss any ingredients out the chances are your cake will not be too pleasurable to eat. Let’s apply the same principles to your website.
There are 6 main ingredients to any successful website. Each ingredient needs to be included in the correct proportion to ensure you have a website that is palatable for your visitors. Google class each of these ingredients as important and so should you.
So, what are the key ingredients all websites need to consider?
1. Look and style
It sounds obvious but your website needs to look good. It needs to be nice on the eye and be aesthetically pleasing. The look of your website has the ability to scare people away within seconds or draw them in – which one is your website doing?
There are many aspects that go into the look and style of the website such as:
All this and more needs to be considered when it comes to website design. A good looking and attractive website doesn’t happen by accident, it’s done with purpose, thought and creativity,
2. Search engine optimisation
As much as a good-looking website is important, we also need to be attracting traffic. If the website looks good but has no visitors, what is the point?
One of the most effective ways to bring new visitors to your website is through SEO (search engine optimisation). This is where visitors find your website organically on search engines such as Google. In other words, not paid ads.
Again, this is not something that happens by accident, it needs time and expertise to rise up the search engine rankings. There are lots of parameters that come into play when it comes to SEO but take a look at the stats below to understand the importance of it…
68% of online experiences begin with a search engine
92.96% of global traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps
53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search
The stats do not lie. If you want a website that generates you leads, then SEO done well can help you achieve this.
Some factors to successful SEO are:
Keyword research: It’s important to understand the keywords that you want to be found for and whether you have the ability to get found for these.
Technical foundations: If your website is not giving its users a good experience, then Google will pick up on this and be reluctant to lift your rankings. So, the quality of your website build and the backend optimisation is important.
Content: The content on your website is important to Google and they put huge value on the quality of this. It’s important that the content is of quality, educates your audience and is SEO friendly.
Local SEO: To help attract more traffic your local Google placement is important. This needs consistent work and to ensure all the correct foundations are in place.
There is much more to successful SEO than we have shared but needless to say, it’s a key ingredient you need as part of your website.
3. Lead generation and conversion
Once you have attracted traffic to your website it’s then about turning that traffic into leads. This is where we talk about conversion. Once someone arrives on your website, we want to convert them from a website visitor into a genuine lead.
Serious thought needs to be given to the best strategy for this and this can look different for each business dependent on:
It’s not just about including a ‘contact us’ button a few times on your website, that strategy will lead to a road called nowhere. You need to strategically look at the above and then devise the right plan for your website to ensure it converts those website visitors into paying customers.
4. The content
The content included on your website is, without doubt, a vital aspect of website success. Gone are the days when you can simply write what you want, add it to your website and then the visitors will magically flow in.
The key considerations when it comes to what content to include on your website are:
The balance when it comes to writing content for your website is between ensuring that it reads well and wanting to get found on Google. This is an art and becoming much more essential.
Google themselves have made it very clear that your content is important to them and the above ‘needs’ are important to them. Content cannot be rushed and just thrown together. The above 4 keys need to be considered and then put in place for every page of your website.
Content done well is without question a vital ingredient for your website.
5. The experience of the user
It’s important that when a person arrives on your website, they have a good experience, and we call this user experience. Again, this is something that Google are placing much more importance on than ever before.
If we use for example a website selling clothes. If you go on that website and are looking for a red jumper in a certain style. You arrive on the website and find jumpers but all you see is page after page of jumpers and there is no way to filter the jumpers based on your preferences. That is not a good user experience.
This is just one example, it does not matter what you do or what industry you are in, you have to make sure the experience on your website is a positive one. It’s your responsibility to ensure that every visitor finds your website to be useable, enjoyable and accessible. If not, you have a problem.
You need to consider the design, the customer journey, the navigation and the content to ensure this it places the website visitor as the main priority, and it’s not just thrown together expecting to get results.
6. The quality of the build
The technical side of your website that no one ever sees is something that so many people give no value to. This is wrong. Things like website speed and responsivity are becoming more and more vital to the likes of Google and the quality of build make a huge difference to this.
If your website is not built well then, the chances are it could be slow and bloated. This is not always easy to fix so must be done well from the start. Google is looking for your website to load quickly because again, this gives a good experience to the user. There are steps that can be taken to quicken up your website but if the website is built correctly from day one then this makes a significant difference.
Also, what is vital is that your website is built responsively so whether the user is visiting your site from a computer or mobile phone the experience is good either way. This is not done by just making a few tweaks to the website, it needs to be coded correctly for maximum impact. Not only that, but we also need to consider different speed factors for the desktop version of your website compared to the mobile version.
All this and more comes into play when it comes to the quality of the build of your website. This is why so often a website that is not professionally built is unlikely to get you the results you are looking for.
This is not an exhaustive list of the ingredients needed as part of a website, but these are a crucial 6. Each of the above ingredients needs to be considered as part of any website. Gone are the days when you can simply put a website up and expect it to succeed. It won’t. Search engines and users are becoming much cleverer and experienced meaning your website needs to follow suit if you are looking for it to help you achieve your business goals.
Choose Purple are a Worksop based website design agency building remarkable WordPress websites that win you more business. If you would like to discuss helping you achieve website success, then please make contact with our team here.
