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Having an attractive, engaging, and informative website is almost mandatory for businesses to thrive in this digital age. For customers, it becomes a virtual portal into the company’s world and workings.
A website contributes to increased awareness about your company and encourages customer involvement, making it a two-way relationship. 97% of buyers depend on an online source of information to research local businesses. 47% of people visit the websites of companies before making a purchase.
Ensuring that your website is made and maintained wisely thus becomes a significant responsibility to be carried out. It requires a lot of strategizing and planning critically. Are you wondering how to pull that off? The following are specific guidelines to keep in mind to create a successful website.
Have a purpose
A website, just like any other endeavor undertaken by an organization, should have clearly defined goals. You must decide whether your website’s purpose is to publish useful articles, increase brand image, create sales, provide customer service, or something else entirely.
Moreover, this purpose should simultaneously sync with the audience’s needs. Thus, whatever function the site sets to fulfill for both parties must be identified beforehand.
Pick the appropriate domain name
The website’s domain name has to be both relevant to the company and accessible to the visitors. Choosing an apt web hosting service, whether shared, individual, cloud, clustered, etc., is also a part of it. You should do this by considering several things, such as the cost, server locations, reliability, etc.
The domain name should be catchy and pertinent to the business at hand. It is advisable to have a short yet descriptive SEO-friendly name free of numbers, abbreviations, and symbols so that it becomes easier to discover the site.
A .com extension is preferable because customers tend to use it commonly while searching. Some other recommended suffixes are .net, .org, .gov, .biz etc., depending on the type of website.
Make it easy to navigate and use
A haphazardly organized website can give customers a frustrating experience. To maximize customer satisfaction, it becomes vital to have a website that demands minimal effort from visitors.
The site must have clear headings and titles for each page- such as ‘contact information’-systematically organized in the menu. Thus, ensuring that the website isn’t too complicated and organizing it by categories and subcategories can make it more accessible.
The website should have a personality of its own, which can be portrayed through images, graphics, and a well-executed design.
Since 80% of web users now own smartphones, it becomes necessary to have a mobile-friendly website so that the company is right at the palms of its consumers.
Invest in SEO
87% of online purchases start with a simple web search. Web hosting services provide analytics and information for Search Engine Optimization, which can perfect the website.
Since more than 75% of such searches go to the pages with the first five rankings, ensuring that the company website has more online presence becomes very important.
SEO increases the website’s exposure and visibility. It ensures that the site will show up more often on the search engine results page when customers search the company or information related to its products and services.
This is done using keywords, internal, external, and social media links, increasing the site loading speed, etc., to boost the website traffic. Therefore, strategizing using SEO tactics can increase the rankings of the website and give it more reach.
Conclusion
Having an efficient, quickly accessible, and memorable website is necessary for businesses worldwide. Therefore it’s important to give your website the attention it requires and deserves.
From selecting a web hosting provider to monitoring the site once it’s established, managing a website is a task that requires care and planning at every stage to optimize its scope and influence.
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