Making a great first impression is essential when trying to attract new customers. Often times, the first opportunity you will have to make a good impression on a potential customer is with your website. A number of factors go into making a website successful.
Recent studies show that using the right colors on your website can increase brand recognition by up to 80 percent. The biggest mistake most business owners make when it comes to their website is failing to optimize it as time goes by. As the world of technology and web design change, your website may start to look outdated.
Simply setting and forgetting your website will make it hard to attract quality sales leads. The following are some of the things you can do to keep your website optimized in 2019.
1. Taking a Mobile-First Approach is Essential
Millions of consumers use their phones and other mobile devices to access websites. If these consumers visit your website and it is not optimized for their devices, it will be difficult to convert them into actual customers. Having to resize all of the pages is annoying to say the least, which is why a responsive website design is essential.
When trying to optimize your site for mobile devices, focus on doing things like shortening up meta titles and reducing the number of pop-ups on your site. Also, you may want to reduce the amount of long form content on the site. Often times, this longer content will not translate well to mobile devices. Taking the time to make these changes will make your content more accessible to mobile users.
2. Make Sure Your Website is Fast
As most business owners know, modern consumers are very busy and have increasingly short attention spans. If your website loads slowly, you will undoubtedly lose a lot of visitors. Over 53 percent of consumers claim they will leave a website that takes longer than 3 to 5 seconds to load.
If you start to notice a problem with page load speeds on your website, getting them fixed in a hurry is crucial. The first thing you need to try when dealing with this problem is reducing file sizes. Large image file sizes can slow down a website significantly, which is why they need to be optimized.
In some instances, your slow page load speeds will be caused by a slow server. Looking for a new hosting solution may be the only way to properly address this problem. Doing a bit of research will help you figure out which hosting provider can supply the fast load speeds you are after.
3. Great Content is the Key Component of a Successful Website
Some business owners get so wrapped up in making their website look great that they forget all about optimizing their content. If the content on your website is poorly written or not keyword optimized, you will struggle to get the attention of search engines like Google.
One of the latest trends in the world of content marketing is optimizing for voice search. Many people use programs like Apple’s Siri to find articles. Putting yourself in the mindset of a consumer using voice recognition software will help you figure out what keyword phrases you need to target. Targeting long tail keywords and phrases can help you in your pursuit of search engine dominance.
4. The Value of a Great User Experience
The only to keep people coming back to your website is by providing them with great user experience. While this may sound like a relatively simple and straightforward task, it is anything but.
Making sure your website is easy to navigate should be priority number one when attempting to provide the user with a great experience. You will also need to make sure that your content is useful and unique. Establishing instant credibility with your website visitors is also important. The best way to do this is by putting testimonials and customer reviews on your homepage.
Instead of trying to take on the difficult process of optimizing a website alone, you need to reach out to knowledgeable professionals and learn how to monitor your website’s performance. An experienced web developer will have no problem auditing your website and fixing the issues they find