How successful is your business website? Are you generating lots of web traffic? Are you receiving enough sales and enquiries or are visitors taking one look at your site and leaving for one of your competitors instead?
The truth is no website is perfect and has a 100% conversion ratio so we can all find ways to improve something. The infographic below from WeddingWire offers 20 do’s and don’ts for you to start with.
DO’S
1. Do invest in creating a professional, secure site for your business.
2. Do keep it simple-too much content. Page copy or too many calls to action will overwhelm your prospects.
3. Do make it possible to contact you easily from your homepage.
4. Do create a navigation bar and bucket your content by theme and importance to your client.
5. Do use easy-to-read and simple colors and fonts.
6. Do aim for at least 250 words of text per page, with keywords included and 1-3 apirational images.
7. Do use Google AdWords tool to determine the strategic keywords for your site SEO and copy.
8. Do create a mobile and tablet friendly site, and test to make sure they are easy to navigate and visitors can contact you from the devices.
9. Do add your social buttons and link to your business blog to grow your brand awareness and generate fresh content on your site.
10. Do add your business reviews to your website homepage-prospects like to know what previous clients had to say about your services and they serve as online testimonials.
DON’TS
1. Don’t underestimate the importance of a strong, easy to navigate site for generating more inquiries.
2. Don’t publish irrelevant content including too many links, videos on autoplay and distracting external ads
3. Don’t bury or over complicate your contact form: it is the most important Section on your site.
4. Don’t make it hard for a prospect to find what they are looking for or they will leave within 10 seconds.
5. Don’t use too many colors and distracting or hard-to-read fonts
6. Don’t include too much copy or images on each page, this will overwhelm your prospect and they will leave.
7. Don’t underestimate the power of strong SEO-follow the key on page factors for SEO and thin clients first when determining your keywords.
8. Don’t forget to test what your website looks like from mobile devices, tablets, and across several internet browsers.
9. Don’t miss out on fresh content: social media sites and blogs are updated frequently and adding these links will help your site get crawled by search engines more often.
10. Don’t exclude past client * testimonials from your site72% of consumers trust online recommendations as much as personal ones.