No matter the size or shape of your business, you need a website to match. When consumers are planning to buy something, whether it’s a service or a product, they often do so by looking it up online first. If you don’t have an online presence, this means that customers would have a much harder time finding you. That being said, simply having a company website won’t help. You need one that your audience likes to visit and happily returns to regularly. Unfortunately, there are lots of ways to mess this up. With that in mind, here are seven mistakes you need to avoid.
Overlooking The Mobile Users
The days when the internet could only be accessed through clunky desktop PCs are long in the past. These days, there are hundreds of devices on which your customers may search the web, many of which they will carry around with them every day. For this reason, it’s crucial that your website responds to and can be viewed across many different devices. Failing to do this could risk alienating many of your potential customers, pushing them to a competitor’s site instead.
Quantity Over Quality Content
As important as it is to drive traffic to your site, you also need to give visitors a reason to stay there and return again later. This is why so many businesses post blog content on their websites too. However, that doesn’t mean that you should churn out as many posts as you can regardless of the quality. With so many already out there, useless and poor articles will be overlooked in favor of more in-depth ones. The content that you post needs to be of interest and value.
Believing SEO Is Dead
Contrary to the mistaken, yet very popular belief, search engine optimization, or SEO, is far from dead. In fact, it’s just as important and relevant today as it always has been. When customers look something up online, they very rarely click past the first few search results. This means that, if your site isn’t displayed there, then you’ll have a hard time boosting traffic. Thankfully, there are many ways to improve your website SEO and display higher on those search engine results.
Using A Standard Theme
Using a ready-made theme can make building your website a relatively quick and stress-free process. There are also lots of affordable options out there, like the free Jekyll themes, which means that you won’t need to break the bank to get online. However, these templates are used by hundreds, if not thousands of other users. Unless you want your site to look the same as many others, then you need to find ways to customize it to match the style of your business.
Too Much Visual Clutter
When it comes to business websites, less is often more. As tempting as it can be to fill your home page with as much information on your brand as possible, this can be confusing and distracting to visitors. Many will get frustrated and overwhelmed quite quickly, causing them to click off after a short time. Make sure you use headers and subheaders on all of your content, as well as images, diagrams, and blank space to break up the text. Categories are also quite helpful.
Hiding The Contact Information
As important as it is to avoid overwhelming your web pages, you should never hide or get rid of information that your visitors might need. Contact information, for example, should be visible on every page. When you hide these crucial details, it tells customers and site visitors that you don’t want to hear from them, which can harm your relationship with them, as well as your reputation. Displaying this information, however, can help to improve your customer service and SEO.
Ignoring Trust-Building Elements
Every day we hear a new story on the news that someone has been scammed online, hacked, or worse. This has made us all a little more wary about what we do on the internet. Because of this, you will need to work a little harder to win the trust of your prospective customers. Ensuring that your site has an HTTPS certificate is an important first step. You should also display trust badges, as well as any comments and reviews from past customers and clients.
Everyone makes mistakes, even entrepreneurs, so if your business website is displaying one or more of these blunders, you’re probably not alone. However, now that you have a better understanding of these mistakes, you can start to put them right.
