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Strong Ways to Beef Up Your Mediocre Website

Fit woman showing her muscles ready to optimize websiteWe were going to write an article about how the stakes for today’s websites have been raised exponentionally. It’s not just enough to just have a website; modern websites have to be faster, better organized, optimized, and mobile-friendly.

Why?

Search engines and social media sites rank mobile-friendly sites higher. Online viewers are abandoning websites that don’t load quickly enough. The quality of content is important, both to search engines and customers.

This quest for the perfect website is getting real.

Mediocre websites just won’t cut it anymore. Your customers are demanding a well-designed, functional, easy-to-use website. You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t indulge them. Here’s how.

Add quality images and video.

People process images faster than text. Yet, one of the top offenses we see online is websites with sub-par images—or, even worse, no images. That does not mean you should steal images off the internet (repeat: that DOES NOT MEAN YOU SHOULD STEAL IMAGES OFF THE INTERNET). Images online cannot be copied and pasted onto your website; many of those images are property and can leave your business open to legal ramifications.

Instead, create your own images and videos or buy the rights to specific images that you can strategically use in your marketing materials. Choose relevant photos to your content, preferably with people’s faces (here’s why images with faces perform better). Look at the overall design of your design, and choose images with complementary colors.

Make it easier to contact you.

People don’t want to waste their time, and they want to make any action they need to take easy. Include call-to-actions in your content, easy-to-use buttons that catch your eye, and quick ways to contact your company ON EVERY PAGE.

Easy contact methods are not enough. If your potential customers don’t hear from you, they move on to the company that does. Implement a stellar customer service process. Assign the responses to a well-trained staff member, and set the standard for response high. All responses should be within hours, not days of the customer’s inquiry. If you don’t have an immediate answer, let the customer know you have received their inquiry and ask additional questions so you can provide the information they want. Unless the inquiry is off the wall (or spam), respond to every e-mail that comes in. Don’t pass up the opportunity to turn a negative inquiry into a positive customer experience.

Optimize it.

businessman with tablet connecting offline and online marketingMore than 90% of website users start their search for information on search engines. Optimize your website for top search engines, such as Google and Bing—or contact a company that can optimize your website for you. Build a site structure optimal for search engines, include strong headlines with relevant keywords, add images with the correct tags, and write content your users want to read with relevant keywords and topics. Text written for your brochure won’t have this information (though it is a start).

Fix any broken links or pages with errors, a major no-go for optimized websites. The major advantage to this process is that not only do your optimization efforts make your websites more appealing to search engines, but also to your online viewers.

If you are a business with local customers, make your contact information incredibly prominent and consider investing in local search engine optimization technology. Local SEO technology optimizes your website so it is ranked highly in searches run by your target audience, your local customers.

Make it faster.

Long website page loads are more than just an inconvenience; they cost you page views and sales. As this article from KISS Metrics states:

According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.”

But the stakes have gotten higher with the rise of mobile devices; not only are smart phone and tablet users looking for a fast load, they are also looking—no demanding—mobile-friendly sites (as these statistics on Social Media Today show). Choose a website design company that includes a mobile-friendly website; this is a must of the modern era, not a maybe.

Add content.

Content is more than a luxury; it’s a must for any company that wants to improve their ranking with search engines and their target audience. Adding content to a website indicates to search engines that your business is relevant to users, and shows users that you want to answer their questions. In essence, high-quality content builds trust with two vital audiences.

Notice the disclaimer: high-quality. High-quality content is grammatically correct, relevant to your audience, complete, and keyword-optimized (if you don’t know how to write it, contact a writer who has the expertise to produce high-quality content for your website). Low-quality content contains typos, sales-focused information, and poor optimization. Content can also be used to drive traffic to your website from emails and social media.

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