However big or small your company, your website is, today, perhaps your most important business tool. It’s where people come for information, where you communicate with your customers, where you drive sales, and where you promote marketing campaigns. It’s everything. But far too many businesses are being held back by underperforming sites—ones that are stuck in the dark ages, instead of being fine-tuned to modern day digital needs.
Having an up-to-date website can be the difference between your business achieving good and spectacular things. Here are six updates you can make today to ensure your website is helping your business grow:
Optimize for Mobile
Today, people are increasingly using their smartphones to search for companies and brands. But if your website isn’t built with mobile in mind, it won’t look good on your customers’ screens. Poorly optimized websites are a massive turn off for the consumer and could mean they lose engagement with you right from the offset. One of the best ways you can adapt your website for mobile is to get to grips with page speed—reduce redirects and manage browser caching so your website loads quickly on mobile devices.
Add a Store Locator
As online-to-offline marketing platform BRIDGE explains, if you’re a company with a lot of physical stores, adding a store locator to your website is one of the first things you should do. Store locators are great for user experience and for driving in-store sales, as they help consumers find their nearest physical store. Store locator software also help to boost SEO and improve the visibility of your stores in local search engine results.
Include CTAs
Having an attractive, aesthetically pleasing website isn’t enough. It’s also important to include some subtle marketing messages to help drive sales and turn visitors into active consumers. There are obviously lots of ways you can do this, but one of the easiest is to bake in some calls to action(CTAs) across your website—simple messaging propositions like “give us a ring” or “click here to add to basket” can prove the final link in the chain.
Update Existing Content, Or Create New Stuff
Poor website content can hamper business growth. If your website contains inaccurate content (like wrong opening times or contact details, for example) then it is almost certainly holding you back. Review all the content on your website and update and improve anything you feel doesn’t quite hit the mark. Good content is SEO-rich, useful, engaging, and communicative. It should inspire the reader and give them genuinely useful information.
Add SSL Encryption
Don’t let the complicated terminology of secure sockets layer encryption put you off—it’s not rocket science. SSL is the creation of an encrypted link between web servers and browsers. It means all data that passes between the two is private. SSL encryption is good for SEO, company reputation, and customer confidence. Encrypted sites display a padlock symbol or green browser bar, which encourages visitors to feel they can trust your website.
Find Out How Your Customers Engage with Your Website
Sophisticated visitor tracking tools can give you a much better overview as to what’s happening across your pages, and how visitors are interacting with your site when they visit it. From the traffic source and keywords used to discover your site to pages viewed and time spent on site, visitor tracking can help you identify the areas of your website that are working, as well as the areas that need immediate improvement.
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