10 website improvements you can do today to get more leads and customers from your site.

10 website improvements to get more business from your website

Do you want more business from your website?

If you are in business, chances are you have a website, and you probably think that it’s doing a good job… probably? Well, you can never be 100% sure so here’s a quick list of things you can do or check to make sure your website is grabbing as many customers as possible for you.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive website design on a tablet

Responsive web design means your website fluidly adapts itself to look good on any device it is visited from. Over 60% of web users are on mobiles and tablets these days, so that’s a massive chunk of potential business any site that hasn’t updated to responsive design is missing out on.

That is a big issue - but unfortunately not an instant fix. What’s more, Google has specifically noted that non-responsive websites will be penalised in their search results as of April 2015.

So any website that isn’t responsive will not only rank lower in search engine results, but will also turn away over 60% of it’s potential business - Wow!

If you only implement one of the things on this list, make sure it’s this one. You may need your web developer to do this for you, and unfortunately it’s tantamount to a complete site redesign, but the ROI is more than worth it to grab the business you are currently missing out on.

Add Calls to Action

Website with strong calls to action visitor makes purchase Many websites - too many - miss out on this vital visitor optimisation function. It’s dead simple - tell your visitors what you want them to do, preferable with a big button that stands out.

Don’t leave your potential customers wondering what to do - make it clear with a CTA that drives your audience to the goal of your site.

Common Calls to action are:

Contact Us
Buy Now
Free Download
Fill in a form

Your CTA could be anything you need it to be, as long as it is clearly defined and highly visible what you want your audience to do, your response rate will increase dramatically.

Add Keywords - the right ones

What do your customers type into Google when they are looking for your products or services? By that I mean, what do they actually type, not what do you imagine they type. Us a tool like Mangools to find out the best keywords, longer phrases are better as they attract traffic from people looking for a very specific item or service.

E.g. Let’s imagine you run an appliance repair business. Optimising your site for ‘washer repair’ will put you up against very stiff competition with very deep pockets. However, try adding a brand and a locality such as ‘Hotpoint washer repair nottingham’ which will improve your local visibility.

Make sure your chosen keyword appears:
In the page url
In the page title
In the H1 - H6 tags
In the image titles
In the image alt tags
In the content
In the meta description

Wordpress users can use a plugin like yoast to help them - check out my free guide here.

Write a Blog Post

Woman writing a blog post While doing your keyword research, you may notice that there are lots of keywords that you could optimise your site for, so why not use these in blog posts.

If people are searching for terms, then this is valuable information, people are letting you know what problems they want solving, and how they look for the solutions. So go ahead and provide them with articles, information and the help they need. Traffic to your site will increase, and so will your sales!

Speed up your website

Website loading speed, like responsive design, is another ranking and visitor conversion factor that can have a negative effect on your business. Google will penalise slow sites, visitors will get impatient and simply click back to the next available site in the search results.

What affects website loading speed? What’s the solution??

There are many factors that could affect your loading speed, these include:
Your hosting platform could be slow - upgrade or move your site
Images - large, unoptimised images really slow a site down - you can optimise yours here: http://optimizilla.com/
Clean out your database - if you run a content management system such as WordPress you can install a plugin to do this for you.
Load scripts at the bottom of the page
Leverage browser caching
Enable GZip Compression

Visit https://gtmetrix.com/ to test your site and find loads more fixes…

Talk about your customers needs, not yourself

marketing-man-person-communication When someone visits your website, they do so because they want to find a solution to a very specific problem. So don’t waste time telling them all about useless information about your company, address the issues they came to you for.

Give information about the problem, and solution. Let them know you understand the problem from their point of view. Tell them how they will feel when you have fixed the problem. Leave the bragging about how good you are for later, focus on the customer, the problem and your solution and the rest will follow.

Let your customers brag for you with reviews

Encourage your customers to leave reviews on your site and other third party review sites. They will do the boasting for you, and this helps future clients trust you as third party reviews are far more credible than beating your own drum, as it were.

Add Trust Logos

By including logos of respected brands you have worked for or with, or associations you are a member of you also increase the trust potential customers have in you. Use the power of associating with well know or official bodies to give you credibility.

Add Schema Mark Up
Schema mark up is a powerful but under used weapon in the SEO arsenal for helping your website rank in search results.

According to Kissmetrics “Schema markup is code (semantic vocabulary) that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.” Read the full article here. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/get-started-using-sch...
How to add schema mark up to your site
The first and most effective piece of schema code to add is your address. You can easily generat the code here https://supple.com.au/tools/local-business-schema-generator/. Simply add the generated code to the footer and contact page(s) of your site and hey presto - instant powerful optimisation.

Add Video

web video viewed on a mobile phone This is the one that many people skirt around - how do you go about adding video to your site? Why should you add video anyway?

Well video is highly engaging and far easier to digest than reading. You can add personality to your site and you’ll hold visitors on your page for longer, which means you’ll also convert more visitors to customers.

If you own a smart phone (and if my 80 year old Dad has an iPhone then you sure do, unless you are my 80 year old Mum) and you can record good web quality video with it straight off the bat. Make sure you prepare well and choose the best location you can, your office will be fine, at least you will look like you are genuinely working!

If that’s a bit to daunting you can easily get someone on Fiverr or People Per Hour to make you a simple, engaging explainer video that gets your message across in an entertaining and easy to digest way.

Don’t upload the videos direct to your site but instead upload them to YouTube or Vimeo and embed these links in your site, that way you won’t slow your site down (I assume you read that part of this post?)

Now it’s your turn to get more business from your website…

I hope you found this article useful. Don’t worry if some of it sounds way to technical, any web developer can easily sort most of the issues out for not much money. Good luck and I hope your online business goes from strength to strength.

What Next

Freelance Web Designer

This free guide was brought to you by Jeff Guest, a freelance web designer and digital marketer from a grey green bit in the centre of England. If you have any questions about the content in this guide, you can email me at jeff@jeffguest.co.uk, I always answer your questions!