Make Your Business Grow With Clear Website Objectives

Whether your business resides solely online or you also have a physical brick and mortar store, website’s can turbo-boost your business’s success. The exciting part of digital marketing and online sales is that your website has unlimited potential for growth.  To make it succeed you need to establish clear website objectives.

Website Objective 1: Help Local People Find You With Local SEO

Local SEO is the process of optimising your website for local searches. The point is to let local consumers know where you are when they’re out and about.

82% of smartphone consumers now carry out “near me” searches when they’re looking for a shop, establishment, product, or service. This makes local SEO more crucial for business than ever before. If your brick and mortar business isn’t optimised for these types of searches (or worse, doesn’t even have a website), chances are you’re missing out on a lot of custom.

Local SEO Techniques

1) Claim your business – Search engines like Google gather data about businesses from around the web, regardless of whether you’ve given it any information or not. If the data it gathers is wrong, this could tarnish your reputation and your SEO efforts.

Your first step to local SEO if to claim your business as your own. Ensure that all listings around the net are accurate and up-to-date. A tool like Moz Local can really help simplify this process.

2) Add location pages – To make sure Google bots associate your website with your physical local establishment, include location pages on your website. If you have businesses in multiple locations, create a separate location landing page for each of your business buildings. The way your address is listed on these pages must be consistent with the way it’s listed on other online directories.

3) Use “Google My Business” – Create a listing on Google My Business to let Google (and consumers) know who you are. Again, consistency is key here. Write a clear and accurate description of your business and include some high quality images.

4) Reviews – Reviews are important for potential customers and for search engines. Google will consider your website more trustworthy and relevant to local searchers if you have some positive reviews under your belt. This will naturally result in a higher Google ranking.

Additionally, reviews act as social proof for those who have conducted a local search, making consumers more likely to opt for your business above others.

Whenever you have a happy customer, simply ask them to leave a Google review.

5) Publish local content – Create and publish content that’s relevant to your local community.

6) Build local relationships for back-linking – Work on building relationships with local businesses and websites relevant to your niche. Once the relationship is established, you can request a backlink to your website, which will help with your local SEO.

Website Objective 2: Blog for Brand Awareness

A blog is a significant part of any website. It provides a place to publish content related to your niche and helps you to build brand awareness, trust and authority. The more posts you have covering different (but relevant) subjects, the more likely you are to reach a wider audience.

Consider your own online searches. The questions you type into that search bar are usually greeted with an array of search results in the form of blog posts that answer your question.

Some blogging tips:

Blog consistently – Have a set day that you publish your posts and keep it consistent. Your audience will get to know when to expect new content from you.

Add keywords – Using low-medium competition keywords with high search volumes will help your blog post get found in search engines. Use a keyword density of around 3%. Any more may be considered spam and negatively impact your ranking.

Shout about your new posts – Let your social media and blog followers know that you have posted – or are about to post – some new content. Get them excited!

Add imagery – Images make blog posts easier to read as they make them more visually appealing. They keep an audience’s attention better than those without imagery.

Make it scannable – Not everyone will read every single word of your post to get their answer. People are generally impatient creatures so use subheadings, bullet points, and bold and italics to highlight important bits.

Encourage follows and comments – If you want people to comment on your blog and follow it, they may need a little nudge to do so. So, what should you do? Simply ask!

Link related content – If you’re concentrating on one niche, chances are you’ll have some posts that are closely related to each other. Link these together to encourage further reading and to help those search engine bots crawl all your blog posts.

Website Objective 3: Add Some Widgets For Extra Functionality

Widgets can be embedded into your website to add specific functionality. And as most website builders are designed to be simple to use, they will enable you to embed widgets into your site easily, without any knowledge of coding.

Widgets can potentially help you meet one of the most important website objectives; easy communication between you and your audience.

You can add things like:

Social media buttons – These link to your social media accounts to enable your audience to like/follow/connect/share at the click of a button.

Contact forms – To be most effective, you should have a contact form above the page fold and invite your audience to fill it in. Keep it simple though. People are far more likely to fill in a short form than a long one that request lots of personal details.

More personal details will come later on. Think of this as the initial meeting. You wouldn’t disclose a lot of personal stuff to someone you just met! But, once you get to know them and have had more interaction with them, you may be more willing to share further details.

Live chat – Make it easy for your audience to get answers to their questions with a live chat widget. This encourages communication and helps relieve any doubts your audience may have about purchasing from you. They also add a layer of credibility to your website as there is effectively someone there to be held accountable for the content on your website.

It’s worth noting here that you shouldn’t overdo it with the widgets. It’s true they can be abundantly useful for business purposes and to meet your website objectives, but at the same time they can impact your site’s speed. This, in turn, can negatively effect your SEO and discourage people from your site. Take the time to make sure your site is optimised for speed and mobile devices.

Website Objective 4: Have Clear Call-To-Actions Throughout

With a few exceptions, a website’s purpose is normally to generate revenue. However, before you begin placing calls-to-action across your website to try and entice sales…

…stop.

Think of the process as a journey that you are guiding your potential customers along. Your end goal (or sale) is your end destination. In most cases, you can’t just jump straight to it.

Consider call-to-actions that encourage sign-ups, contacts, and followers. These are your valuable visitors that you can work on converting to sales further down the line with your email marketing campaigns. This is called “The Foot in The Door” technique. The basic principle is that if you ask someone to do a small task initially, they will be more likely to complete a big one for you later on.

Additionally, by not requesting a sale right away, you are helping to establish trust. It is a less pushy sales technique that your audience will be more likely to see through to the end.

Website Objective 5: Optimise Your Site

To get the most out of your website, optimise it for speed and mobile devices to make sure it can be viewed by all who click on your links. Your audience wont sit there for 10-20 seconds waiting for bits of your website to load. They’ll simply click off it and look elsewhere.

Here are some tips for optimising your site:

• Keep your pages minimalistic. As already mentioned, things like widgets add to the page loading time, so be sure not overdo it with the fancy effects and functionalities.
• Select a dependable and reputable hosting provider. Shared hosting is generally slower than VPS and dedicated hosting because you are sharing the server space with others.
• Compress your website’s images. Just like widgets, images slow down your site.
• Conduct regular website caching.
• Use a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to determine how fast your site is.
• Ensure you can read all the text and view all the images on a mobile device.

Website Objective 6: Make Your Website Smooth and Crisp

Last in our list of meeting your website objectives is to have a smooth and crisp website design that functions well. Everything on your website should run smoothly. Every page should be easy to navigate. Have clear links and menus that guide your audience around your website smoothly.

Doing this can increase the time each person spends on your website because you are directing them where to go and how to find certain information. If your audience spends more time on your site, your SEO will improve and you will gradually get more traffic.

Make certain that there are no 404 page errors and that each aspect of your website is functioning well. For example, if your contact form doesn’t load properly, consider swapping it with another or hiring a website designer to sort the problem out for you.

Bringing It All Together

A website can have a massive positive impact on business growth. It is a whole new channel to market your products and services to countless people interested in what you have to offer.

The main takeaway here is to use your website the way it’s intended; as a tool to communicate with your audience and promote your products or services.  This Website Design Checklist shows you step by step how to make your website a success.