The goal of a business’ website is to be more than a pretty design, but also to help visitors reach the site and then convert from mere visitors to paying customers. This type of design is known as “design for conversion” and if a business wants to succeed online they should incorporate these 15 elements of design, optimization, and conversion tactics.
What A Well-Designed Business Website Should Include
1. Thorough, organized sitemap. No unnecessary pages. The site map will also allow bots from the search engines to crawl every page, and as a result, your website will rise to the top of the rankings much more quickly.
2. Essential business info placed prominently on every page. People shouldn’t have to search for a way to contact you. The standard location these days is in the footer on every page, allowing a quick reference, and helping out with local SEO for bonus points!
3. Intuitive navigation. The more rapidly visitors can find the article, product or link that they’re looking for on your website, the higher the site’s conversion rates will be.
4. Responsive design/Mobile version of the site. Don’t miss out on the 55% of internet usage that takes place on tablets and mobile devices! A responsive site displays optimally on various different screen sizes, ensuring that all your visitors see an informative and well presented page. If a responsive design is impossible for some reason, a mobile version of the site will have to do.
5. Visible, compelling call to action. Implement large and eye-catching calls to action or contact forms to ensure you guide visitors to your desired action. Use a contrasting color and a bold font to ensure your calls to action don’t go unnoticed.
6. Develop a blog. While this is not necessarily a design item, a good blog is one of the most future-proof forms of search engine optimization, ensuring you have the opportunity to rank for a wide variety of long-tail keyword phrases. A blog serves the additional purpose of keeping your brand at the top of your potential clients’ minds.
7. Tasteful color scheme. Style is subjective and you’re not going to please everyone all of the time. However, a professional color scheme will go a long way to help establish your brand, visual identity, and maintain continuity between your physical and online properties. Notice that when you visit the Starbucks or Fedex website, it almost feels as though you’ve walked into one of their stores.
8. Valuable, diverse types of content. You don’t want to greet your site visitors with just a wall of text, so make sure you include images, videos, whatever content is necessary. Make sure the images and videos you use are high quality to enhance your business’s product and services. Don’t overload your site with too many videos and images though, as that will slow down your site’s load time and a slow-loading site loses customers. Varied content with essentials is important, as it helps viewers find the info they’re looking for and increases conversion.
9. Relevant headers. Headers are hugely important in the creation of skim-able content, and also from an SEO perspective. When writing content for the web, utilizing descriptive headers is a best practice.
10. Optimized meta tags. Do you want your website to rank high in the search engines for certain key phrases? Then title tags are your best friend. Meta descriptions will entice traffic to your site from the search results page. Alt tags will inform the search engines about the nature of an image and its content.
11. Site search capabilities. In order to help visitors swiftly navigate the website, you should include a search function to the site. A search feature is even more necessary for sites that possess a lot of content or products.
12. Easy social share and bookmark buttons. Each page of a website designed for conversions should have a button that users can click to instantly share and bookmark your site. Social sharing goes a long way to building a following, a community around your brand, strengthening loyalty, and increasing conversion rate.
13. Accessible customer service. Patrons want to receive help immediately when they need it, so your business should allow customers to call a representative during business hours or submit a request form on your website 24/7. Additionally, several studies have shown that websites that include phone numbers have much higher conversion rates than those that do not. Include your phone number in a particularly conspicuous place, such as the top right corner of your site above the search box.
14. Reviews and testimonials. Trust signals, like testimonials and reviews, are an important factor in building the confidence of your prospective clients. A well-placed review may be the difference between an interested window-shopper and a first time customer.
15. Frequently asked questions (FAQs). If you provide a service that often receives specific questions, turn it into a questionnaire and use the page to highlight keywords for optimization. An FAQ page is not only good for getting traffic to your site, it also helps to convert visitors. Confused customers usually don’t make purchases. Create a detailed section of your site for frequently asked questions, and organize the questions and answers by category.
Ready to Create Your Own Business Website?
There are many more features that you can use on your site to make it work. You know your business and your customers, so you have a good idea how to tailor your site to gain customers. But those we’ve listed above are a great start!
If you’re interested in creating or upgrading your website to one that is attractive and converts visitors into customers, contact Thrive and we’ll start working on a well-designed business website that is custom fit to your needs!
