In a previous post I explored some of the reasons that every business should have a website, if you haven’t already read that you can take a look here.
In this post I wanted to explain why it’s so important to have a quality website and what constitutes a good quality website.
Whatever you’re looking for, whether a service or product, you are likely to search online in the first instance, in fact 97% of people go online to find a business or service, this reason alone shows just how important a website is.
97% of consumers go online to find a local business or local service - Blue Corona
But presence alone is not necessarily enough to get that all important sale. The likelihood is that most, if not all, of your competitors are also online with websites of their own, so you need to stand out from the crowd and make potential customers buy from you instead of clicking away from your website and going to a competitor.
What can you do to make your website one of you biggest sales tools? Well, it’s all about quality, the quality of your website will help you to secure those visitors and all-important leads/sales.
How Can a Good Quality Website Benefit my Business?
Your website is available 24/7 even when you’re not – Your website is available to be searched 24 hours per day, 7 days a week, all year, it doesn’t matter if you’re on holiday, or if someone is searching out of working hours, your website will still be there, providing the important info to your visitors and encouraging leads and sales, even when you’re off the clock.
It makes the customer experience easier – A good quality website means that your customers won’t need to ask as many questions because all the information they need, all those frequently asked questions will be in one place for them to access whenever they need. Giving you more time to focus on the other parts of the business that need your attention.
Helps to increase brand awareness – I’ve talked about brand awareness a lot and there’s a reason for that. It is so important that your customers connect with your brand and its story and your website will help to do just that.
Builds trust with your audience – If somebody visits a website that is not up to date or the content or design doesn’t work or just doesn’t feel right, then they are going to go somewhere else. It’s that simple!
Stay ahead of competitors – If you haven’t invested in your website yet then I can guarantee your competitors are. So get ahead of them, make your business stand out with a top quality website.
What makes a Good Quality Website?
Easy to navigate and use – User Experience (UX) is crucial to keeping visitors engaged and interested in your website. Lets be honest, we’re all generally in hurry for some reason or another, which means your visitors are likely to be as well, so making navigation as easy as possible for them will help to keep them looking at your website.
Consistent design – consistency in your website design and branding is what will help clients and future clients to really connect with your brand. Eye catching design will initially attract visitors to click through to your website and then consistency in your branding and design will then help them to begin to get a feel for your brand, who your company is and what you stand for.
Accurate and useful content – your content needs to be accurate and engaging, it’s no use having a beautifully designed website that tells your visitors absolutely nothing. Keeping you content up to date and ensuring you are providing solutions and answers to your customers key problems will keep them interested and encourage them to trust your credibility and knowledge.
Eye catching imagery – this goes hand in hand with consistent design really, but I felt it was worth highlighting on its own as well, because there’s nothing more off putting than a website with blurry or distorted images. If you aren’t able to create a whole bank of unique images then gather a mix of unique and stock images to ensure the image quality is on point.
Responsive Design / Mobile optimised – The majority of people use mobile devices to search for things now, so your website needs to look great on all devices from laptops and desktops to smart phones and tablets, to ensure that you don’t put off the majority of your audience.
Clear call to actions – Once your website is looking hot and your content is telling your visitors all they need to know, you then need to make it really clear what action they need to take next. Visitors won’t hang about and if they can’t instantly see what they need to do, they will simply click away, so making it really easy for them to take action will help to really secure that lead or sale.
Optimise for search engines – Finally once you have a stunning website with useful content and clear call to actions you then need people to be able to find it. Here are just a couple of things that will help to increase your optimisation for search engines –
Page titles and descriptions – include these on every page
Alt text on images – alternative text tells search engines what each of your images are
Keywords included organically in content – including your keywords throughout your website naturally is extremely important
Site speed – keep an eye on the speed of your website, if it’s too slow then you can get penalised by search engines.
I hope this helps to give you an idea of why a good quality website is so important and how you can improve the quality of your website. If you want any advice on how to improve your website or create a new one, please get in touch and I’d be happy to help.