In today’s world, your business’s online presence is vital. Regardless of your industry whether your business is e-commerce, fitness, legal, beauty etc, having an online platform is so important to ke
In today’s world, your business’s online presence is vital. Regardless of your industry whether your business is e-commerce, fitness, legal, beauty etc, having an online platform is so important to keep up with the competition and to generate future leads.
When it comes to rebranding your website, or building a new website; There are key stages that shouldn’t be overlooked such as mobile responsiveness, website structure, navigation, search engine optimisation (SEO) to name a few!
At AW MEDIA we can help with everything from web development, branding, and content marketing when creating your website and landing pages.
We have put together some of the vital steps that we always consider when creating websites for you:-
Website Mobile Responsiveness
A website’s success can often be down to mobile responsiveness. It is reported that on average some of us spend around 5 hours a day on our mobiles. Whether we’re online shopping, looking for help and advice, or just casually browsing, that’s a lot of time spent looking at mobile websites! So, it’s imperative that your business’s mobile website offers a positive user experience.
If potential customers land on your site and find it difficult to read or navigate on a mobile device, they may simply abandon you in favour of your competitors. Negative mobile user experiences can also affect your website’s search engine rankings, making it harder for users to find you through a Google search.
Make your website easy to find
It’s so important to make sure your domain name either matches your company name or describes your business in some way. If you want to be technical you can also have multiple domain names pointing to your website. We can help set that up for you.
Incorporating technical SEO best practices, keyword research, content marketing, and paid advertising campaigns can also help drive traffic to your website.
Visible contact information
Have you visited a website recently and found that you have spent far too long looking for contact information or a simple button to press to get in touch? That only happens on poorly designed websites where the user’s journey hasn’t been taken into account. It can result in the loss of potential clients, sales, and lead conversions.
Careful planning is so important.
Make this information easy to find! The same goes for any social media accounts that connect with your business. Don’t hide them!
Website Navigation
No matter where your leads land on your website, you need to make it as easy as possible for them to get back to the homepage and contact you. Industry experts also advise that you should try to keep your top-level navigation menu limited to 5 clearly labelled tabs and organise your other service pages clearly under them to avoid overwhelming your website traffic. Google can often deliver new users to different service pages on your website so it’s important to ensure your end-user finds what they are looking for on that page, and that they have a clear route back to the homepage.
Unclutter your website
There is literally nothing worse than clicking a link in Google thinking you are landing on a page that contains what you’re looking for…….then being faced with endless content and irrelevant ‘padding’. Whilst you want to do your best to generate organic traffic with great SEO, filling up your pages for the sake of it can overload your audience, at that point - you’ve lost them because they have lost interest.
Balance is key when it comes to information and graphics. Keep your pages clean and flowing by keeping content relevant and in context.
Overloading your website with annoying widgets that you think are great but actually, restrict your users’ view or overcomplicate your pages are also unnecessary. Think about what your audience actually wants to see and what their journey on your website looks like. If your widget doesn’t support the content on a particular page or is distracting, remove it or move it to a more relevant page.
Make sure your website content is accurate
This really goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway! Inaccurate or misleading information will turn off your audience quicker than a light switch. Whether this is in relation to incorrect pricing, outdated information, incorrect information, or even simple grammatical errors, this can give the wrong impression to your users.
A great tip is to ensure you proofread a complete page before publishing, get a team together and ask them all to review the content and travel through the page as if they are the user. It’s a good idea to periodically review your content too when updating the page generally, or making a schedule to do it regardless of new additions to your website.
Check Website Speed
New research by Google has confirmed that 53% of web users will leave a website if it doesn’t load within 3 seconds. That’s right 3 seconds! In today’s world, we can be impatient and expect results immediately, you cannot afford to have a slow website. This can lead to a massive loss in traffic and potential leads. It doesn’t matter how ‘attractive’ your website is, or how great your product is if people don’t want to wait to see it.
The biggest hurdle is getting traffic to land on your website in the first place, don’t lose them because you haven’t optimised your images and videos, you haven’t kept your software up to date and your host can’t handle your bandwidth demands!
Call to Action (CTA)
Whether you want your users to book a call with you, send an enquiry, buy a product, sign up for your newsletter etc, whatever the purpose of your website is - if you don’t have a clear ‘call to action’ you’re essentially turning your customers away.
Every page on your website should contain a call to action. Your website needs to encourage your visitors to take the action you want by enticing them to click that button, sign up for a service or buy a product. Don’t make your visitors scroll to find your CTA, keep it near the top, add a widget that flows with the page, and most importantly don’t overcomplicate it!
Simple Website design
Let your brand shine ………….. but don’t distract your users from the goal of your business goals. There is a fine line between great graphic design and distracting graphic design when it comes to websites. Keep your use of fonts, colours, GIFs to a limit, use bullet points and short paragraphs so your users can scan information rather than try to trawl through it and lose interest! Some sectors do tend to have to offer more information on their websites than others, we recommend keeping paragraphs limited to around 6 lines to keep the attention of your audience.
To get your website ranking higher and to appear on the search engine results page (SERP) your site needs to be mobile-friendly. Remember, overloading your website can decrease its speed and mobile responsiveness.
Website copy
To build trust in your services and expertise your potential customers need to see the value of your products or services. Whether they are visiting your site for educational or research purposes, or to find out more information in relation to your products you should keep your content focused, factual and relevant.
Think about the buyers’ journey, what information would be helpful to them? You know about your product or service and know why it’s great, you need to convey that to your users. Focusing on your content from your customers’ perspective can keep them o your site longer and will more likely create a long-lasting relationship, which in turn breeds results!
Not a writer? No problem: we work with a team of professional SEO copywriters!
These are just a few of the things you need to take into account if you are rebranding or building a new website in 2023. Whether your website is built on WordPress, Squarespace or Shopify - the basics are all essentially the same.
Whatever your goals for your business this year, at AW Media our award-winning team can offer the expertise you need to help your business succeed in 2023.
Still not sure? Check out what our clients have to say about our services
Most importantly, we wish you and your business every success in 2023 and we can’t wait to hear from you!
Happy New Year!
