5 Ways to Make Your Business Website More Effective

Your business's website is the cornerstone of any dependable digital marketing strategy. Learn 5 tips on how to make your business website more effective.

Small and medium businesses all over the country are reeling from the economic impact of the pandemic. Some business owners have even expressed doubts whether their enterprises can fully recover. If you're similarly anxious about the health of your small business, you can save your business by drawing in more customers through strategic marketing. And the best and most cost-effective method to do so right now is via digital marketing.

According to a recent survey, 76 percent of small businesses who have employed digital marketing techniques say that these methods were effective. But the cornerstone of a great digital marketing strategy is your business's website. Without an effective business website, your digital marketing strategies are more likely to fail rather than succeed.

Here are five ways you can ensure your business website is efficient and appealing to potential customers. Use them wisely to help your digital marketing plans succeed.

1. Get a Great Domain Name

Users will need to find your website quickly, and one of the best ways to do so is by ensuring it has a great domain name. But what are the hallmarks of a great domain name?

First, it has to be simple, with little chance that someone can misspell the name. Second, it must succinctly capture what your business is about. If you're a company that offers home loan refinancing, your domain name should contain the words "mortgage" or "home loan." If you offer specific gardening needs, maybe a domain name with words like "ash tree care" is appropriate. Your domain name should also be short and sweet. No one has the time to type a whole sentence into their search bars and the longer the domain name, the more likely someone misspells it.

2. Invest in Above the Fold

The term "above the fold" originates from newspaper parlance, indicating the area of a newspaper a customer browsing the newsstand sees because it is above where the sheet if folded. On a website, it refers to the first area on the top portion of a page, usually the homepage.

The above-the-fold portion of your business website should be filled with information and images. For starters, it should contain your business's banner, perhaps its contact information, permanent address, and a catchy tagline. The main image a new user should see should be immediately captivating to draw in users. You should also make sure the headlines they first see are attention-grabbing, just like with newspapers.

3. Ensure Mobile Responsiveness

Over 56 percent of all internet traffic in 2021 originated from mobile users. This means you cannot afford to alienate mobile internet users form using your site. Most small businesses focus on building websites that work seamlessly on laptops and desktop interfaces but completely forget to optimize the site for use on smartphones and tablets. A mobile responsive website means that design elements of the site shift accordingly when viewed or used on a smaller device. This includes easier to read fonts, shifting content to avoid cluttering and resizing buttons to make them more clickable on a smaller screen.

4. Focus on Navigation

Many people compare websites to books, with the navigation bar as a table of contents. However, this a very inaccurate comparison because books can never be as intricate and confusing as a website. Unless you carefully plan your website, it may end up turning into a confusing maze of subpages.

Focus on streamlining your website and making it easy for users to navigate their way around. One of the best ways to achieve this level of simplicity is by creating a map of your entire website before you make it. This map will enable you to prune unnecessary areas and coax other pages into a more coherent flow for your users.

5. Make Sure It's Fast

Speed is of the essence, especially for customers. Thanks to the proliferation of high-speed internet networks, modern users now expect their pages to load within seconds and if your website can't achieve such speeds, you run the risk of customers going back to the results page instead. You must determine how best to improve the loading speed of your website.

Some methods try to reduce the size, and therefor enhance load speed, of your website. These methods include compressing images to reduce the file size, removing or simplifying the interactive features of your site and making sure that any add-ons to the page are of reasonable size.

Websites are your digital storefront and you should do whatever it takes to make them work as smoothly as possible. These tips will ensure you have a site that helps your digital marketing strategy and attracts customers.