4 Tips To Make Your Site Better

How long has it been since your website has been updated or refreshed? 2 years? 5 years? Longer??

Is your website a part of your marketing plan? If it’s not, it should be. Your website should be the foundation to which all your marketing revolves around. It’s the face of your company on the internet. Up to 85% of consumers will leave a website if it is poorly designed, so it’s important to make sure yours is top-notch. Make leads fall in love with your website all over again.

Four Website Tips For A Better Site

1. Simple Websites:

   • Speed is incredibly important when building and developing a website for a small to medium sized business.  The longer it takes to load a site, the higher the likelihood that the user will bounce.  If you get a lot of bounces this is bad for business as well as bad in the eyes of Google.  By keeping your site design sleek and simple, you can also make it faster.
   • Action Step: Look at the site’s Google Analytics and start determining which pages people are not going to and see if you can eliminate them altogether.
   • Action Step #2: Make sure that your hosting service is as fast as possible. You can check your site speed at Google’s testing site.

2. Content That Is Easy-to-Find:

   • The longer it takes for a user to find what they are looking for the higher the possibility of them bouncing off the site.  As we just talked about…bounces are BAD.  To keep your bounce rate low, you need to make your content easy to find.  The way to do that is to understand what the user wants most and deliver that first.  Most visitors only go to three or four pages on a website so when you develop a new site or redesign a site, make sure that you have a clear path for that person to take.
   • Action Step: One important way to do this is to cut down on the amount of items in your menu.  If your menu is cluttered and messy it will drive people away.

3. Desktop and Mobile Design Optimization:

   • We know that more and more people are seeing your site on mobile first so you MUST have your site speak to those searches.  When we design and develop a site for clients ReachLocal designs them with that mobile first visit in mind.  We know that this is what is going to convert traffic as well as play well with Google.  Good mobile sites will rank better on Google because the search engines want to the visitor to have a good experience.  If the site looks bad on mobile and has a high bounce rate, it will impact your SEO (search engine optimization).
   • Action Step: Visit your mobile site…be honest with yourself, how does it look? You can use Google’s mobile viewer to see your site.

4. Win Conversions:

   • Websites are not meant to be static.  The site should evolve to get more leads. To understand what it takes to get more leads you need to track the site.  ReachLocal’s Edge system allows you to monitor the sites conversions.  Once you know what’s converting and more importantly what is not, you then need to build your site with that data to get more conversions.
   • Action Step: Adding chat to a website has been found to greatly increase conversions.  Add chat today!

Watch the below video to learn how we move websites from old and outdated to sleek and slender marketing platforms. You can also read our article to find more information on these current trends.