Here is an easy checklist to make sure your website is working for you – follow these 9 steps and you’ll be well on your way to getting more visitors and more enquiries.
1. Imagery
Websites with images always look more appealing – and more memorable.
But don’t fill it with extremely generic stock images, you need images that really relate to your business and your audience.
Photos of your premises/products/staff are all great, as long as they have been professionally taken! They will have more of an emotional impact on web visitors than generic images of models pretending to work.
Remember, keep file sizes low otherwise, they affect site speed!
2. Quick Speed
Google now check your site speed – and it can affect your search rankings.
A slow website will more than just hinder usability for visitors – if it takes too long, they will simply leave.
But now you will actually lose rankings, it if continually takes seconds and seconds to load.
Here the Google page where you can test your site speed
There are several factors that can affect this, but once you know it’s a problem, your web dev and the web hosting company should be able to help you.
3. Call to Actions
To gain more enquiries from your website, you should use Calls-to-Actions (CTA)
A CTA is basically a button or image telling someone to do something – here is a simple version
They make it easy for visitors to enquire – a button is always more enticing to click than just a text link.
If you use an image CTA, you can add more information and let them know why they should click – these are used to for any download materials you offer, not just direct enquiries.
Here’s an example of a CTA from Studio Rossiter
4. Easy Navigation
When a website gets older, and you keep adding more and more pages, the navigation can get quite tricky – trying to squeeze everything in – and it is no longer helpful to the user.
Make sure the navigation is nice and simple.
Visitors need to know where they are, how to access other parts of the site and always – how to contact / or find the cart if you’re providing e-commerce.
5. Large Text
More and more computer monitors are getting bigger – so where standard website text used to be size 10 -11 – it’s now better to have a 14 or above!
The text should be able to update, depending on the screen size – so on a mobile, it needs to be substantially bigger. It gives the reader maximum readability on a variety of screen sizes.
6. Responsiveness
You’ve heard it before – but it’s so important – your website must display well on a variety of devices. Otherwise, you will lose visitors as quickly as they came.
It’s not just for visitors to be able to read and navigate your site well. Again, Google will reduce your search rankings if your site is not mobile-friendly – so make it a top priority!
7. Great Content
We know that online people only skim-read online – so the need for well-written, clear, and well-formatted content is imperative.
It needs to be specific and relevant, and concise – and kept up to date.
Large paragraphs won’t be read, so keep to bullet points, lots of headings and short sentences – that’ll make it easier for visitors to find what they want to read about.
8. A Blog
To boost your website’s prominence on the web, and to give returning visitors something new – a regularly updated, expertly written blog is a great idea.
It also lets Google know you’re an expert on your subject and that you update the site regularly – which is good!
What should you write about? You can feature testimonials or reviews, any related industry news, top tips, new ideas and more – get creative!
9. SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) will help your website to be found online. Often it’s worth bringing in an expert to make sure this is done properly, but there are a few small things you can do.
Start by researching relevant keywords, and making sure your site includes them. Make sure every page has a proper Meta Title and Description. Make sure all images have Alt Tags.
There is a great Beginners Guide to SEO here by MOZ – this will give you a good idea of where to start!
