Many people have clear ideas about how they want their new websites to look or function, but they haven’t considered some of the most crucial aspects of the process. The best way to approach this endeavor is not to ask what you want in your website, but why you need one. Here are six tips that you should know before starting the process of developing a new website.
1. Set the right goals
If you are creating a new website for your business, you need to have clear, measurable goals. Some of these include concrete targets for your conversion rates, how to increase your sales figures or how to generate more sales leads. Your website can also help improve your brand awareness and reduce some of the costs of doing business.
2. Become knowledgeable about SEO
Although you will benefit from hiring professionals to help improve your website traffic, you should understand how SEO works. Most businesses will probably want to eventually hire their own in-house expert. SEO stands for search engine optimization. What this basically means is, your website needs to appear on the first page when potential customers search for your product or service. Ideally, your website should be at the top of the first page. Only 5 percent of searchers are willing to search page two or beyond, so this is vital for the success of your website.
SEO basically consists of understanding the keywords that people use to search for your site’s topic and how much authority your website has. By choosing the right keywords to target and placing them correctly in your website content, your site will gain more relevance to people’s search activities. This means your site will come up in more searches.
In order to place higher on the search results, your website has to have a high authority score. Google and other search engines use an algorithm to score your site’s authority. Most of this depends on which sites are linking to yours, the quality of your site’s content, the age of your site and how often you post new content on the site. There are actually hundreds of factors that go into your website’s ranking, but these are the top ones.
3. Have a good mobile strategy
Most people who visit sites are using mobile devices. You should research what percentage of people are visiting your site with mobile devices in order to make some important design decisions. For example, you might want to make a separate site or mobile app that is ideal for smartphone users. At the very least, make sure your website is viewable on a smartphone. With WordPress, it’s very easy to design a site that can adapt to different screen sizes and devices.
4. Observe and learn from your competitors
If you don’t have a website, you can bet that your competitors do, and they have a thorough online marketing strategy in place. Take note of the way they design their website and the keywords they’re targeting. With this knowledge, you can use some of these strategies and also figure out how to differentiate yourself or outperform their design or marketing. Many great designers start with someone else’s ideas and then modify them to make it uniquely their own. There’s no reason why you can’t do that also.
5. The call to action should be the key element of your content
The whole point of having a website is to get potential clients or customers to take a specific action. When you are putting content on your site, it should always help accomplish this goal in some way.
6. Give people a good reason to take action
In real life, you wouldn’t hand someone a business card without saying a word. That’s because you understand that you can’t get business without giving people a good reason to take the next step toward doing business with you. The same is true on your website. All of your web design decisions should consider how it helps with your conversion rate. Tell them why they should sign up for your newsletter or take out their credit card and make a purchase.
