What should you expect from your website in 2016??

This article outlines the top 10 most important features to make sure are included in your website if you are looking to gain a return on your web development investment.

Websites have come a long way. No longer are websites just online brochures or blogs of content. And while it is still true you have to have one, just having one is not enough. There is a lot of talk about “Website Best Practices” but what exactly are they and what do you need to realize a return on the often large investment in dollars, time and resources that building a website can cost? This article provides my top 10 must haves for generating ROI from your website.

1. Let your web visitor know what you do for them

The most important thing you can do when a visitor lands on your website is to let them know what it is you do. You have about 10 seconds or less to convince them that you are interesting enough for them to stick around and find out more.

You can let them know what you do with headlines, beautiful images or video. I have found video to be a very effective tool for both increasing time on site and website conversions. Many people these days prefer to access information in short bursts via video rather than from text on a page. 

2. Strong Call to Action

Once you have grabbed your visitors’ attention and they are interested in your products or services, it’s very important that you tell them what you want them to do. I see so many websites with a lot of pretty pictures or amazing copy, but without a strong call to action. Note that too many options are also bad. Too many choices confuse people. Limit the number of decisions you want people to make to just one or two for best results. A strong call to action will lift your conversion rate exponentially.

3. Prominent contact information

While you might wish that everyone would read all the wonderful content and FAQs on your website, not everyone will. Some people will want to call you to find out more about your services or to find out if you do in fact provide exactly what it is they are looking for and they will leave your site rather than read it. Make it easy for them by making your phone number extremely large and prominent at the top of your home page. And on every page of your site. Including it in your header is generally the best option.

Also don’t forget that some people would prefer to email you, or can’t call you during business hours due to the type of work they do. Provide an easy to access contact form for them to use. And do provide this as a contact form instead of posting your email address on your website. The last thing you need is email spammers scraping your site to collect your email address and then spamming you with all sorts of unwanted mail.

If you are a service business then it’s likely that calls or form submits are the type of conversions you are looking for. Another great way to increase your visit to lead conversion rate for service businesses is via live chat. A chat widget can increase the leads generated from your website by an additional 3% of your site visitors at minimum.

4. Show them how to find more information – people won’t always scroll unless there is a good reason to

We spoke already about a strong call to action and prominent contact information. You are probably noticing a theme here. Well I’m going to continue that by telling you that people won’t always scroll on a website unless they believe there is something worth scrolling for. 

I see many websites these days that have either a large beautiful image or image slider that completely fills the space above the fold. Carousels in particular can lead your web visitor to believe that everything important is already in the carousel and there is no need to scroll further. 

If you have important content that will help convince your visitors that you are the right choice for them, then let them know it’s there. The easiest way to do this is by finishing your top of page content above the fold and show the top of the next content section above the fold too. That way your visitors can see it and will know to scroll down to see what it says. Other options including continuing your top of page design elements below the fold, using arrows, clickable buttons or links which direct them there or even just by telling them to “scroll down to learn more”.

5. Attractive, but not beautiful at the cost of functional

One of my pet peeves with the many do it yourself website services which are available today, is that their templates while beautiful are not functional in terms of being optimized for conversion. Most of them break pretty much all of the first four must haves for generating ROI from your website. I see many, many examples of these templates where the entire area above the fold is an amazingly shot beautiful image or image gallery or slider. Be careful, study after study over the years has shown that beautiful websites do not convert as well as ugly ones. And while these days people are more and more wanting aesthetically pleasing websites, ones that don’t follow the guidelines included here won’t deliver the ROI you should be looking for.

In general, the best websites I see in terms of delivering ROI are those built by marketing companies rather than website companies (or your nephew who said he could build you a site for free from his garage). A marketing agency will take the holistic objectives of your business into account and work with you to design a website which converts and drives ROI rather than just looks good. Also, please take their advice. Absolutely let them know your business objectives and goals and provide all the information and images they need to design and build you a great website, however they are experts at building websites that convert rather than just look pretty to you. The perfect website for you, may not look like the image you had in your head.

One last thing on attractiveness of websites, is that the look and feel of websites changes over time. And studies have shown that modern up to date looking websites convert at a higher rate than those which were built (or look like they were built) even just a couple of years earlier. As such it’s important to keep your site design and architecture updated and refreshed at least every couple of years.

6. Mobile Optimized, and Adaptive vs Responsive

Now that the majority of website visits are via mobile devices, this is extremely important. Both because Google now won’t even show your site in their organic search results on mobile if your site isn’t at least responsive, or that you’ll pay more for each click gained via PPC, but also because people will just leave as soon as they arrive.

You’ve heard from me before about adaptive vs responsive web design. Adaptive sites are where the site will adjust itself to best fit the device it is seen on vs responsive which just changes size and rearranges content and images. An adaptive site will change a phone number to a click to call button, the menu to a mobile navigation link, it will hide content not needed on a mobile device and will switch out large images for ones the perfect size for the device at hand (improving mobile load speeds). I continuously see adaptive sites converting at a higher rate than even the responsive ones. 

7. Continuous updates and content refreshes, eg: blogging

I mentioned in my fifth must have about keeping the design of your site refreshed and up to date. That is also important for your content. Google loves fresh content and includes the frequency and quality of your content updates within its organic ranking algorithm. A blog is the easiest way to do this, but regular updates to images and other page content are also important. If you don’t have time to do this yourself, many marketing agencies will include onsite blogging and content or image updates as part of their marketing services. Yet another reason to work with a marketing agency rather than a website company to build your site for you.

8. Social validation

Social networks have become a way of life and are the new word of mouth. They are an important source of validation for your business too. Did you know that Facebook has the largest number of business reviews of any site on the internet? Even more than Yelp.

Connecting and displaying your social networks on your website is good for business. Your visitors will be able to check out your social pages to verify that you are a valid business. They will be able to see the content you are posting to determine whether it is informative and trustworthy and whether you display the type of personality they would like to do business with. That being said, linking to a page without any posts or engagement is not going to generate the trust and conversions you are looking for.

For a small business Facebook recommends posting at least twice per week. For larger businesses it should be more often. Include images and videos with your posts and try to project your business’s “voice” through the content you post.

One important point is to make sure that your social links open in a new tab or new browser. That way your website is there for them to come back to easily. There is always the risk that your visitor will get distracted by other notifications and updates once they are inside Facebook. You would hate to have them not remember how to get back to your website and find your competitor instead.

9. Drive traffic

Remember the age old conundrum “If a tree falls in the forest and no-one hears it, did it make a sound?” Well owning a website is kind of like that. If you own a website and no-one knows it’s there, does it even exist?

Once you have your not too attractive, but conversion friendly website it’s important to attract visitors to it. What is the best way to do this you might ask? Well that will depend on your target audience and the products or services you offer. My favorite and most successful source for delivering targeted website traffic has always been PPC. Other options also include: targeted display advertising, social advertising, email marketing, SEO and content marketing. For larger businesses I also recommend retargeting to bring back to the site visitors who may have left without converting the first time. For many clients the optimal solution is a combination of different solutions designed to target your prospects at different stages of their decision making process.

10. Lead nurturing

Not every visitor to your site will convert on their first visit. It’s important to stay top of mind and build their trust over time with high quality content about your products or services so that when they are ready to buy you are already on their short list. I already mentioned retargeting as one method of staying in front of site visitors after they have left and are surfing around the web. Social Media Management is another option to keep your content and brand in their newsfeed. Having them subscribe to your blog or email newsletter is yet another way. Again, the best method for you will depend on the type and size of your business and could include multiple solutions. Remember, in general people need to see or interact with your brand at least 4-5 times before its starts to seem familiar and build trust.

11. Ongoing Support and Maintenance

Lastly, don’t forget about ongoing support. We continuously are approached by businesses who have purchased websites from web development companies who hand over the site to the business to host themselves and do not provide ongoing maintenance and support. As mentioned throughout this article ongoing redesign, content and image updates are required these days to stay relevant and found. Web browsers are changing constantly too and it’s important to ensure that your website and any plugins included remain both secure and compatible. You are going to need web development maintenance support over the life of your website.

 Conclusion

If you are a business owner looking to invest in a new website, my #1 recommendation is to do what you do best and let others do the same. Design and development of a website takes time – from writing and editing copy, designing the framework and navigation to the many hours of searching for and purchasing images and then development and QA of the site. These tasks take many days, weeks, or even months depending on the size and complexity of the site, to get right. Would that time not have been better spent focusing on growing your business?

The right agency partner can fill the gaps in your marketing capabilities and allow you to run your business. A prerequisite to creating a great website is having a good marketing foundation. You should be looking for someone who can coach you through the exercise of defining your market, targeting one or more segments of that market, creating buyer personas, and crafting an effective marketing message. They should ensure that messaging is used consistently and flows intelligently through your website, plus ensure your marketing message is fully integrated across all your different marketing solutions to ensure there is no brand confusion and that your prospects are seeing consistent branding from you across their buying journey. They should be there with you along the way as your business and marketing needs change.