Your website is a powerful tool, but are you making the most of its capabilities? You have the ability to reach a huge, targeted audience with your website, creating leads, and making sales. Of course, we all want our websites to work a little harder for us, but how can we make this a reality?
There is no silver bullet when it comes to digital marketing, but there are lots of little things that come together to make a big difference. While you will be doing well in some of these areas, there are always small elements you can improve on, which can have a big impact on your business.
12 ways you can make your website work harder for your business
User Experience
A poor user experience is going to destroy the level of engagement you get with your website. You may be getting plenty of traffic, but if there are user experience errors that annoy your visitors, they are probably going to go somewhere else for their information. You work hard to get people to your site, so when they arrive, you want to give them the best possible experience.
This means making your website easy to navigate, making sure there are no broken links, and avoiding the other mistakes that frustrate people. Look at your website as if you were the end-user and find the areas people might find frustrating. A big part of this is ensuring your website works well on mobile devices and loads quickly. If you are not getting these things right, your website will not give you the desired results.
Understand Your Target Audience
You need to be reaching a target audience with your website. For example, if you are business sells squash rackets, there isno great benefit in reaching lots of tennis enthusiasts. This might result in some traffic, but it is not going to bring lasting results.
To do this, you need to understand your target audience and how they search for it. While “rackets“ might seem like an obvious keyword for your squash racket business, it might not necessarily be how your audience searches for your products. The better you understand important details about your target audience, the easier it is to craft the content that is going to engage them:
You are always looking to optimize your website and make it more effective, but you cannot do this if you do notunderstand your target audience’s wants. You should have plenty of data to help you find the answer to this question, and you always have the option of surveying your visitors to get more information.
Think About the Customer Journey
People do not land on your website and buy your product or service there and then. They go on a customer journey, and how you control this journey has a big impact on your website‘s success. You must understand where each part of your website fits into the customer journey and, therefore, the actions you should encourage people to take next. For example, a blog titled “The Basics of SEO“ appeals to people at a different stage of the customer journey to one titled “5 Pro Tools to Take Your SEO to the Next Level.“
When you build your site and create content, it is important to keep the customer journey in mind and understand what actions you want people to take on those pages. This will help you keep people engaged for longer and boost conversions.
Further Your Education
If you want to get ahead of all the developments in digital marketing, then one of the best options is to invest in your education. Degrees such as a Master of Arts in Digital Marketing and Data Analytics online program can give you the skills to take your marketing to the next level. Whether you are starting a new website or have an existing website you want to improve, these digital marketing skills can make all the difference.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an essential part of reaching your target audience, and it is an area that can substantially improve your website’s performance. Ideally, you want to be ranking for major keywords in your industry and bringing in organic traffic, but this is difficult to do without good keyword research.
Make sure you are not just focusing on keywords with high search volumes, but also considering the difficulty. You might find that some keywords are just too difficult to rank for at the moment, and it is better to go after some longtail keywords with slightly lower search volumes but less competition.
It is better to rank top ten for keywords with low search volumes than not rank for those with high search volumes, so make sure you are getting the balance right. Once you have got a good list of keywords, you can start crafting the high-quality content that will allow you to rank for them.
Meet Expectations
If people come to your website expecting one thing and give them something else, they will not stick around. You have got to meet people‘s expectations early on in the process;otherwise, you are going to miss out on a large chunk of your audience.
When someone clicks on your site, it is generally based on a promise. Through your search engine listing, or social post, you have promised the user certain information, and this has convinced them to click your link. You have got to make sure you follow through on this promise and get to the meat of the information early on in your content.
If people feel like you are not giving them the information you promised them, it will not be good for your site. The only way your website achieves success is by offering people value, and to do this, you have got to meet expectations.
Make Use of Different Content Forms
People consume information in different ways. Some people might like to read texts, but other people prefer watching a video. You can cater to people no matter what content they prefer, so make sure you are offering them options.
If you limit your content to written blogs, you might be missing out on a big segment of your audience. It does nottake much to turn your blogs into a video or podcast andmixing in these content forms can make your website much more efficient.
The nice thing about this is it gives you the ability to repurpose content and get more out of each idea. You might write a blog about “The Best CRMs for Small Businesses,“but if you can also make a video, podcast, and infographic, then you have got a lot more to share with people. Go back over all your content and see if you can add to it by creating multiple different content forms.
Optimize Your Lead Collection
Engagement might be the first step in making your website work harder for you, but you have got to make sure that is not where it ends. If you are going to turn visitors into customers, then you need to make sure you‘re creating leads. If you are creating great content that people find useful, then this should not be a problem. Using good calls to action and making forms easy to fill out gives people every reason to seek your services.
Remember, though, people are very protective of their contact details (nobody wants to be spammed), so you have to convince people that what you are offering is of value. Being honest with what you are offering and giving people an incentive to become a lead (a lead magnet) are great options here. Once you have got someone‘s contact details, you have a direct route to communicate with them and further demonstrate your services’ value.
Share Your Work
Your website is not the only way to reach your target audience. There are many other channels where you can share your work and increase your content’s reach. Producing amazing content that resonates with your audience takes time and effort, and you want to maximize your investment. This is why you should look to get as much exposure as possible for your work, and social media platforms are a great place to do this.
Share your work on the platforms your target audience hangs out on and work to build your following. If you do this well, then it can bring in consistent traffic for your website, just by sharing your content a bit more.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a great tool for your website, and one of the great things about it is that a lot of it can be automated. If you are creating good landing pages that encourage people to act and sign up for your updates, then you can see impressive results from this marketing medium. Again though, you only see results when you do things well and offer your audience value.
Rather than constantly sending out emails that are focused on your products and services, focus on what you can do for your audience. This is going to enhance your relationship with your audience, and if you continue to do this, it will eventually lead to people making a purchase.
When people give you their email, they are trusting you with a direct link to their inbox, so you have to respect this. Good email marketing can have a big impact on your sales, but it will quickly lead to an unsubscribe if you get it wrong.
Remove Barriers to Sales
People go through a complicated thought process before buying your products or committing to your services. They weigh up pros and cons and evaluate all the information that is available to them. Once they have made this decision, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to take the next step.
Too many websites put barriers between the point where someone decides they want something and the point where they actually commit to it. The more barriers there are, the more your conversion rate is going to drop off.
Go through your site and find any barriers to a sale. If you can get rid of these and make it as simple as possible for people to complete their payment, then more people will follow throughwith their purchase.
Be Consistent
No matter how you approach your digital marketing, you have to be consistent with it. If you do things sporadically, then you do not give it enough time to see the true benefits. Many things you do with your website take time to come to fruition, so you have to see it as an investment in the future. The longer you implement these techniques, the more success you will see, and the harder your website will work for you.
Your website has the ability to work for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but you have got to consistently put the effort in from your side as well.
Conclusion
You can always make your website work harder for your business. Whether it is getting more traffic, increasing engagement, creating more leads, or making more sales, you can do lots of little things to improve your performance. However, there isno magic answer to these questions; instead, it is all about creating value for your users and being consistent with what you do.
Too many websites start doing digital marketing expecting to see immediate results when in most cases, it takes time to see the benefits of your hard work. The results will come through, and when they do, they are well worth the wait.
With these steps, you can build a website that works for your business, essential in the modern–day. It might take some hard work but implementing these strategies will improve the performance of your site and generate more leads for your business.
