Your company’s website may be its most powerful marketing tool. Five billion people are online, and most want to shop and engage with their favorite brands on digital forums. If you don’t have a website, your customers won’t be able to engage with your brand how they want.
Fortunately, you can use free and cheap tools to build a quality website, even if you don’t have strong coding skills. A poor-quality website will turn users off your brand. You need a good website.
High-Quality, Fresh, and Evergreen Content
The most important thing you can do to make your website great is to fill it with high-quality, fresh, evergreen content. That will mean writing a blog about things relevant to your business. If you run a heating and air conditioning company, for example, you can blog on topics like different HVAC systems, strategies to save money on heating and cooling, maintenance tips for your HVAC, and so on. If you run a veterinary practice, you can blog about common pet diseases and pet care topics. Blogging can bring in more traffic to your website, engage your customer base with the information they’ll find valuable, and even encourage a community to establish itself around your website.
But all the content on your website should be high-quality, which means well-written and free of typos and grammatical errors. Write long-form blog posts that encourage backlinks. Include video content from your YouTube channel on your website. Update your blog content regularly – use your site analytics to determine what days and times users are most engaged with your content, and publish new blog posts on those days and at those times consistently. Keep your content fresh by regularly updating facts and statistics, fixing broken links, adding new links, updating infographics and other visuals, and revising your SEO keywords and metadata. Keep content evergreen to remain viable for years (with regular refreshments, of course).
Strong Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Strong SEO helps your website appear at the top of search rankings for relevant keywords and is an essential driver of traffic to your website. Some aspects of SEO are things you can do yourself, like creating quality, evergreen content using relevant SEO keywords and long-tail keywords. Other strategies include building backlinks by answering questions on Quora, writing guest blog posts for other sites, or participating in online forums, and including links to your site. You might need the help of a Rochester SEO agency for some aspects of your website SEO, such as optimizing your metadata and URLs.
Ease of Use and Navigability
You want users to spend time on your site, not arrive and immediately leave again. The lower your site’s bounce rate is, the higher your site will rank and the closer it will appear to the top of Google’s search returns. Part of keeping users on your site has strong, original, helpful content, but the ease of use and navigability are also important. Users won’t want to hang around on your site if it’s hard to use and find your way around. Layouts should be consistent on every page. Navigation should be logical, and the site’s hierarchy should be clear. Users should be able to do what they want on your site quickly.
Strong Calls to Action
You have to ask your users to interact with your site how you want them to act. Leave a clear call to action at the bottom of each post. Do you want them to make purchases, download ebooks, follow your company on social media, or join a mailing list? Ask them! Clear calls to action should appear on each page and at the bottom of each blog post.
Accessible Contact Information
A web search for your company can’t engage your company if they don’t know how to contact you. Include clear contact information and your business location. Put this information on its page. Include a map of your location.
Shareability
Quite a lot of website traffic comes from links shared on social media, so make sure your website is easy to share. Include sharing links on your blog posts and video content so that users can share your quality content quickly.
A great website can help you grow your business by bringing in new customers from all over the web. Ensure your company’s website has the elements of greatness, so you can focus on providing your customers with the high quality of service they deserve.
