Your website is the core of your online marketing activities. If you look at all of the marketing channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn; their purpose is to bring visitors to your website, and the primary reason for a website is to turn these visitors into customers.
In terms of marketing, this is called “conversion”. A bad website will mostly waste money on your marketing methods because you don’t need more visitors if you can’t turn them into paying customers. Therefore, the better your website is, the more visitors you convert into customers. And it doesn’t matter if you sell consumer products online, provide local services, or build homes. When someone visits your site, they expect certain things which are crucial for them to browse your site and to make a purchasing decision. Following are the five essential components that any visitor will expect on your site:
1. Navigation
Want to know why your website visitors are leaving your site without showing any interest or performing any actions?
Confusing website navigation, among many other factors, can be the reason.
Website navigation is crucial to any business, and it really doesn’t matter if you are a registered business entity, a startup, or a small personal blog. If your site doesn’t have navigation easy enough for your visitors and customers to browse through different pages and links on your website, then you are definitely losing potential customers and loyal readers.
Following are the few reasons why website navigation is crucial, and some tips to achieve it!
Increase Dwelling Time and Decreased Bounce Rate
Dwelling time is the amount of time a visitor spends on a website, and in 2019, it’s one of the essential SEO factors. Dwelling time is one among the various factors that Google and many other search engines consider to better understand the quality of a website’s content, authority, user-friendliness, and trustworthiness.
If a visitor spends a certain “undisclosed” time on a webpage, then Google considers it to be a positive indication and may give the concerned site better position on search result pages.
Now the question is how to improve your dwelling time?
The answer to this question isn’t so simple as it requires a series of steps that you must work upon, but one of the essential steps in implementing “easy” navigation.
Make sure that your menu bar has links to all your products and services. You must also provide easy navigation to all important webpages such as about us, contact us, terms of service, privacy policy, etc.
Impacts Overall Site Design
Consistency, coupled with hard work is the key to success, and the same is true for a site design. If your home page has horizontal navigation and your inner product page has vertical navigation, then it creates a sort of disorientation. Furthermore, it also impacts your site’s authority as it “proves” to your visitors that your site is poorly designed. To prevent it from happening makes you that you have a consistent and easy to access navigation design throughout your site.
2. Contact Information
So, you have a high-ranking positions on Google for your targeted keywords, and your site is organically generating 100’s and even 1000’s of daily visitors. But why aren’t you getting any calls or business inquiries.
The answer is: you don’t have proper, accessible contact information on your site.
Listing legit contact information is somewhat of a no barrier, but still, there are thousands of businesses who don’t have any proper, easy to access contact information listed on their site. This simple mistake is costing them hundreds and even thousands of dollars in monthly revenue.
Important points to consider before listing any contact information:
1. Make sure that you offer your visitors a registered company address.
2. Give your visitors an option to contact you via email or to make it even easier by offering them a contact form.
3. Harness the power of a free structured data tool (https://varvy.com/tools/address/) to create and implement address schema onto your site.
How to fix missing contact information issue?
If your site is powered by WordPress, then all you need to do is to populate your footer area with a text widget containing your business’ contact information. It can be both a simple text and business information with the schema markup.
Below is an example of address structured data code:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Klever media</span><br>
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>287 High Road</span><br>
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Benfleet</span>,
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>Essex</span>
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>SS7 5HA</span><br>
<span itemprop=”addressCountry”>United Kingdom</span>
</div>
3. Vetted reviews
Is there an advantage to showing customers’ reviews to buyers?
Well, it turns out that 90% of people looking for a specific product read a review before making a purchase decision. Another report reveals that about 88% of consumers trust online ratings and will make decisions based on them.
A separate report shows that a one-star increase on the yelp translates to a 5-9% improvement in the company’s sales and that a negative rating can cost a company between 25 and 30 clients.
So, now you know the importance of online reviews and why showing your vetted review on your site to your potential customers is so crucial.
4. Services or Portfolio
According to the Small Business Administration, each year, 627,000 new businesses are established in the United States. This amounts to approximately 1700 companies per day. Would you expect anyone to remember the service or products these companies offer to their customers? Not at all, right?
Therefore, as an online company, the only way for you to stand out in the crowd and have a lasting impression is to prove to your potential customers first-hand that you are an authority, a well-established and professional business with years of experience in the field and hundreds of satisfied customers.
For this purpose, you may want to have a portfolio or service page on your website to show all your products and offerings to customers in an appealing way. This will give your potential future customers with sufficient information to evaluate your work and make the right purchasing decision.
5. Calls to action
The CTA or call to action is an essential component of any Internet marketing or promotion campaign. It really doesn’t matter if you are an affiliate marketer or any commercial entity yourself, if you want to promote a product or service, then you need to provide your visitors with easy navigation to the offering in question.
The problem is that virtually no website visitor clicks to an internal link or a link that is embedded in a paragraph. For example, you will need to make promotional links more appealing and catchier, so they grab your visitors’ attention and make them click on them.