Key Website Best Practices: 9 Tips You Should Implement

Marketing campaigns such as email marketing, social media marketing, or even SEO are some of the techniques you use to attract prospect or customers to your site. The attention span of your customer is very short. Upon landing on your website, you will want to grab their attention and intuitively offer what users want.  Here are nine tips your website should be following to increase time spent on your website.

1. Easy to navigate

Your website should be intuitive and easy to navigate. Upon landing on your page, most visitors would first look for the navigation bar to look around the site. They would not want to have to spend time figuring out how to get to main areas of the site. As an unspoken rule, your company’s logo (generally located at the top left of your website) should always link to back to your home page. Your navigation bar should also include the most important elements with each category containing a subcategory underneath.

2. Offer something

Offer something to your site visitors once they land on your page. Such content can be a free content offer such as an eBook, webinar or even an infographic. Of course, you should indicate the benefits of getting such content in exchange for their contact information. Your offer should target at only those who fit the profile of your buyer persona. That way, it ensures a better lead to conversion ratio.

3. Contact information

You must include a way for your customers or prospects to get in touch with you. After all, the business is also about building trust. Your company should state a phone number for people to call in or even an email address. Customers want to know that if they have a problem, they can contact your company and speak to someone about it. You also can put up a toll-free number for customers to get in touch. Putting up a number shows that your company is genuine and serious about business, and also receptive to enquiries.

4. Consistency

When focusing on your company’s brand, ensure that your tone is consistent across different mediums. The overall design and personality should remain the same no matter how customers come in contact with your brand. It should stay the same for your website and even on social media. Therefore, before making any changes to your site, ensure that it is always aligned.

5. Audience-focused

Today internet users are more impatient than ever. Your information should be easy to locate, clear and concise. Moreover, design your website to answer questions which your buyer persona has. Include other content such as images or videos which are easier for users to digest.

6. CTAs

After constructing the design and information, you will also want to include a strong CTA. A strong CTA guides your site visitors to take the desired action. Your CTA should be easy to locate by contrasting it with the rest of the page. Often, it is a red or deep blue button.

7. Secured

Security is one of the considerations for Google’s search ranking. Moreover, ensuring your website is secured allows your users to feel safe and that your site is trustworthy. Your customers would want to feel safe when conducting business with you. Moreover, your website will collect personal information to gather leads. Having a secured site ensures your users that the information they shared with you is also secured.

8. Mobile-optimised

More people are now using mobile devices to access the internet. Such is the convenience of the “pocket computer”, and some people use it exclusively to surf the web. If your site is not mobile optimised, you are missing out on a lot of traffic. 85% of people think that a business mobile website experience should equal or exceed the desktop experience. With an increasing use of mobile devices, businesses should adopt the concept of responsive design for their websites.

9. Loads fast

According to Akamai, a delay of 2 seconds causes people to leave your website, and abandonment rate increases 5.8% every second after that. If the images on your webpage take very long to load, your site visitors are sure to bounce even before they engage with your site. These days, people are busy and demanding, their user experience matters a lot. It makes or breaks their impression of your brand. It can even determine whether it would warrant a future interaction with your brand or company.

For a start, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and see your company website through their eyes. Then, figure out what works and whatever needs improvement. Often, your site also serve as a lead generation tool for you. So, integrate with analytics tools to measure your performance and understand user behaviour. Analyse your data and make constant improvements. So, there you go, nine tips your website should be following to increase time spent on your website

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