5 Important Tips To Help Your Website Succeed Online in 2022

In this article, we will discuss the following points

1. Define your market

2. Search Engine Optimisation

3. Content Design

4. Systems Integration

5. Ease of Use

Next, you want to narrow down is your product or service a Desire or a Need product or service. The marketplace only has 2 categories. Products or services that are a desire and products or services that are a need.

Example. the new iPhone has just hit the shelves. You have a perfectly good iPhone in your pocket but you Desire the new one because it looks so nice.

But if you cut yourself or you fall sick then you must find help in the way of a Doctor. This falls into the category of a Need. The Doctor is selling you a solution that you Need to fix your problem.

Once you have figured out which of the 2 marketplace categories your product or service falls into you will have more focus and be able to provide more expertise and more precise marketing efforts to the marketplace.

So if you happen to have a garage that sells mufflers, sells tires, offers general servicing and more, consider what is the most profitable service that you sell, and is this a service that the market needs? Let’s say now that you have decided that muffler service and sales are the most profitable for you and you know that every car has a muffler. So great, Now you want to design a website that only offers muffler service and sales. If you keep working on your website you will eventually develop a reputation as an expert in Mufflers and when someone needs your services they will know which website to visit.

Now let’s look at a product selling website. If you sell handbags, but you also sell scarfs, shoes, hats and more. You will almost always do better if you become specialized and stand out in peoples mind as that website that sells the product they are looking for. So again you would research what is your most profitable product. Let’s say its handbags. Does the marketplace need or desire handbags? If the answer is yes then specialize in handbags. Devote your social media efforts and your SEO efforts to promoting handbags. It will take time but it will pay off.

This is the same strategy or philosophy that we use with social media posting. We have a strategy that offers daily free information to the public in the field that we are experts in. Eventually, when someone needs a service in the field that we specialize in they will know who to contact.

A well-designed Search engine Optimisation program will involve such tasks as setting your business up on local directories, Setting up your Google My Business Page so it has all the data that Google needs to promote your site. Setting up Google reviews on your homepage so new customers can see your social proof. If you don’t have any Google reviews then the SEO team might reach out to past customers for you and ask them to write a review. Setting you up on Google Maps, including a website link. Setting up a Blog page on your site with regular relevant content, setting up your social media accounts, linking your social media accounts to your site and your site to the social media accounts. It will involve looking at the responsiveness of your site to check if it doesn’t look nice on mobile devices. It will involve looking at the loading speed of your site, maybe installing a caching plugin to improve loading times. Also installing software on the back end of your site that automatically optimises all images on upload. This and a lot more will go into a well designed SEO Program. And the program should run for at least 6 months. the reason the program should run for 6 months is search Engines like Google will want to see consistent content being added to your site before they start to rank you as a site that is valued.

Most companies like our will help you get started with SEO via an initial audit. This audit usually takes anywhere from a few days to a week and is delivered to you via email. These audits are designed in such a way as to look at what you need in order to improve your SEO. the audit will look at such things as broken internal links, how many images don’t have titles and alt text behind them, how many sites are linking to yours and more. For our free audit click here.

Yes you guessed it, A Blog.

A Blog page on your website is one of the best ways to increase traffic and gain conversions for your website. If you want to learn more about the fundamentals of writing a good looking blog post then click here.

Within your Blog posts, you must always be offering solutions to problems or advice that is helpful. Google will recognize this over time and slowly but surely your content will rise up the google ranks.

Another thing to consider with the content design of your website is responsiveness.

Responsiveness is a term used to describe how a website looks on a mobile device. A fully responsive website should be designed in such a way that it loads properly and changes the layout to suit whatever device it is being loaded on.

With today’s audience on websites moving more and more towards mobile devices are their platform of choice for web browsing you want to make sure that your website has no errors when loading on a tablet or a mobile phone. You can see in the image below that this website received 30% of its views from a mobile device last month. Now if we had been lazy and not checked every page and post for mobile responsiveness you can bet that that figure would be a lot lower and the bounce rate would also be higher with all views from a mobile device leading to an immediate departure from your site (a bounce).

The systems you may consider for your website would be, an email capture page. The email capture page would gather all customers email into your MailChimp list for later remarketing. But it’s not enough just to put a sign up form on your website. You need to incentivise the sign up with a free offer. This way you are making a trade. you are trading your free product for the customer’s contact details. Now lets look at another system that your Cat Toys website can perform for you. By now you should already know the importance of video marketing. So you can make some short 60 second videos on your phone that promote your most popular product. These videos can be promoted on Facebook and Instagram with a link to your website. You can mention a special coupon code in your video that people can enter on your shopping cart. Also you can install Facebook Pixel on your site and Re Market to anyone who has visited your site recently. So here we have identified 2 systems already. 1. Email Capture 2. Video marketing.

Let’s hypothesize another business model. You have a service based business that is a need business as opposed to a desire business. People need your services when they have a problem. Let’s say you operate a mechanic shop.

Systems you might consider for your website are a call to action button on the top of every page (just like you see on this site). This call to action button could promote a free online checkup of your car. Now, this is simply a button that takes people to a contact page with a form. The form asks a series of questions with multiple choice answers. The questions could be “How many kilometres has your car done”, “What was the odometer reading at the last service”, “When was your oil replaced last” and so on. At the end of the form you ask for the customer’s contact details and you can add them to your contact list. You can also have a thank you for submitting response that says”Would you like us to book you in for a Free 20 minute check-up”? So this is a free service hook.

Another system you can have for your mechanic shop website a competition page. This competition page runs a regular monthly competition where people need to tag your store’s social media handle with a photo on Instagram or Facebook in order to enter. The prize can be something of value that people want. Maybe a free oil change or something like that. With this prize, you can also have you suppliers co-brand with you. For example, you can contact your oil supplier and ask would they be interested in being promoted with your competition as long as they provide you with the oil no charge. Co-branding works very well in competitions. Click here for information on competition software.

You need to carry this functionality across all your website design. You can see here that the navigation bar is minimal with the pages cleanly organized into categories. You can see the uniform design across all the pages. the pages have a header. The header has a background and text. All the same across all the site.

And look at the colour scheme, the colour scheme is synchronized with the brand colours. The colour code of the logo is all throughout the site. The same goes for all the websites we build. Have a look here at Botanica Medicines. You can see the same design with the text being the same color code as the logo.

At the end of the day, you want your website to be as minimal as possible whilst still offering the systems and the offers to the marketplace that you need. Remove anything that is a hindrance and not a help to the customer.

Finally, place yourself in the position of the customer when viewing your site. Does it flow well or is it clunky and annoying to use.

For help with your website design see more info here.

If you would like more free resources to help you succeed online please view our video learning page here.