If you run a business, no matter how large or type, having a website is a necessity, especially if you want to make a success out of it. In this information age we live in, everyone expects that a business will have an online presence. Despite that, you do have your business owners that believe having a website is not necessary. Not only is having a website important, it’s also important that your website has all the best features on it, as this will ensure it outdoes its competitors.
Below are 5 features that your business website should have, if you want to make a success out of it:
1. Contact Information
It’s very important that your website contains important contact information. This may include, business location (with a map), a telephone number, contact form and email address. You want to place all of this information above the fold, so the visitor doesn’t have to scroll down to find it. You also want to contain specific information about your business, such as, work hours, social media pages and other information.
2. Mobile Friendly
Because of the number of people using other mediums to access the internet, it’s no longer acceptable for you to focus exclusively on how your website looks on a PC monitor. Today, close to 60% of internet browsing is done on a mobile device, with more and more people buying and trading things via these devices.
Thus, if your website isn’t designed with mobile traffic in mind, then you lose, potentially 60% of your potential traffic, right from the beginning. You just want to ensure that your website is fully functional on a mobile device, so that your visitors can access the site and do whatever it is, they want to do on it. Having a mobile ready site, could potentially skyrocket your traffic. That said, it still needs to be compatible with PCs.
3. Professional Coding
It is possible for you to create your own website. There are tons of free tools out there that you can use to do it. You just need to ensure that your website is properly constructed. This means, ensuring that all your images load up as they should, all your videos work, and your contact information is there, so people can find your place of business.
If you know how to do all of these things, then you can do it yourself, but if you don’t, then you shouldn’t hesitate to seek help from a professional. All money spent on the website will definitely be worth it; you want to ensure your website is the very best that it can be. As the alternative is a website littered with errors, missing pages, images and videos.
4. Search Engine Optimisation
If SEO is done well on your website, it can have a huge impact on the number of visitors that reach your website. Search engine optimisation is a big, continuous task that involves three key areas, these are: on-page optimisation (that’s content quality and keywords), off-site optimisation (that’s domain authority, backlinks and page rank) and on-site optimisation (that’s metadata, site speed and sitemaps). There are plugins, if you use a content management system, that you can use, that will guide you through the process, as you do not want to over or under optimise your site. You also don’t want to make the mistake of exclusively tailoring your website to the search engines, as neglecting the visitors you intend to visit the site can be detrimental.
5. Social Media Integration
There are tons of different social platforms available today, and you should definitely take advantage of them to promote your website, because social media is a huge part of online marketing. There are tons of businesses online today that have made a success of their businesses, from using social media exclusively to market it.
When you integrate these social media platforms into your website, you can hope to see an improvement in your SEO, improvement in your social media presence and an improvement in your business footprint. Should you maintain a presence on all these different platforms? Yes, you should, providing you take the time to keep everything up to date on all of them; you want to keep your visitors engaged.
We can expect that social media will be here for a long time to come, so it’s definitely worth the time and investment.
Guest article written by: Uchenna Ani-Okoye is a former IT Manager who now runs his own computer support website https://www.compuchenna.co.uk.