10 Things ALL Successful Business Websites Must Have
One of most important things you can do for your business is making sure that potential customers have a great experience when visiting your website for the first time.
Digital first impressions are very essential because based on several studies, 88% of people admit that they are less likely to return to a website if they have a bad experience. Here you will find 10 points we believe that every successful business should have.
1. A pleasing design
You could have a great product or service, but if your website is old designed you will have a hard time attracting your potential customers and convincing them about your business, so that is why your website needs to be easy on eyes, it is as simple as that.
Your website needs to be visually clutter-free. That means limiting yourself throughout the website to a couple of different fonts, font sizes, and colors. You should also make sure that the first thing a visitor sees on your homepage (everything above the fold) is well designed because the last thing you want is to make a potential customer bounce right back.
2. Mobile friendly layout
Based on new researches, half of all web traffic comes now from mobile phones, and 85% of people believe that the mobile version of a website must be even better than the desktop version. So if your website is not mobile friendly, you are losing half of your potential customers, and this is not a good idea for your business at all.
3. User friendly website structure
Your website must be easy to navigate for a first time visitor. You can lose a visitor’s attention in a second, and if customer faced a problem finding a specific page on your website, they might end up on one of your business competitor’s website.
Ensuring that there is an easy way for your visitor to get back to the homepage regardless of where he has arrived.
The last thing a website visitor wants is to get lost in a jungle of a website, so giving them an easy way to navigate to homepage will let them explore more in your website.
4. Great content
Over the last decade, providing visitors with great content has become more and more important. Previously, you could build a great company, invest some money into marketing, and the rest will sort automatically, but nowadays with the big competition in digital world, this has become harder.
A company blog could be the basic corner of your company’s content marketing strategy that is why running a blog is more important than ever. Moreover, a high quality content will allow you to support your branding and launching your company’s expertise to readers, all this leads to driving visitors to your website for many years to come through search traffic and therefore convincing your potential customers.
5. Social media
Not only a blog supports your branding, strong social media presence does too. Social media presence allows you to show and spread your business, it also allow you to communicate with your customers directly. But you have to know that being on social media is not enough alone, you should provide links to your social media accounts on your website.
Social media is incredibly important. Fresh data from August 2018 shows that more than 1 million Lebanese are active users on Facebook, with other social media platforms also so showing your business to that audience could be very valuable for your business.
6. Clear and complete contact info
Your basic business information like directions, phone number, opening hours, and email address must be extremely easy to find. And having dedicated pages in your menu, and list of services could also be very important, all this will make a new visitor comes back again.
Creating a marketing chat platform for your customers to interact with your company is very essential also, this will allow an AI employee to help any visitor, ask questions, and connect the visitor with the sales team leader.
7. About you
“About us” page is a type of page that every business website should have. It is a great way to harden your company’s branding.
People’s attention duration is very short and getting shorter so you have to be careful when creating this page, keep it short and sweet so that a visitor can scan the info and catch the main points directly.
8. Social proofs
Potential customers need to know that you are legitimate, they are always trying to figure out if your company is trustworthy. For that, make a page which help your visitors to conclude that.
A page of social proofs could include positive reviews, customer testimonials, or customers success stories that your business or products has received. Mostly anything that makes you look amazing.
9. Security
Speaking of trustworthiness, having a secure website is a total must in this day and age.
Cyber security is something that viewers care about the most, and your business must take this very seriously. A poor security protocol poses a risk to you, your customers and your partners. A single breach of your website could end up being a killing blow for small and medium businesses.
10. Calls to action
Calls to actions, or CTAs, can come in several forms. The simplest ones could be simply be an image that links you to a different web page or social media site.
Another common type of CTA is to have a form either at the end of a site or to have it pop up as the visitor is about to leave your website. If your CTA is a form, you need to ensure that you keep it short and sweet. Visitors, and especially those from cold traffic, would not like to fill in 10 required fields. It might even be a smart idea to ask for just one or two pieces of information: email, and perhaps a name.