Business Website Tips for your Solopreneur Website.
Here are some business website tips for your small business website. Is your website not ranking very high in search results? Are visitors leaving your website fast? You may have items on your website that are hurting your ranking in search engines. If a user can’t find or navigate through your website you will lose potential business. Websites are often the first impression of your company to a potential customer. Websites need to perform well to beat the competition and rank higher in search rankings. The battle to keep a user’s attention begins when they first arrive at your website. You have 3 seconds to make a great first impression.
- Can a user tell what is your product or service right away?
- Do you identify who you are?
- How does the user contact you and is it clear?
- Do you state the benefits of your hiring you for your services or purchasing your product?
- Do you have outdated features?
Here are 5 items that can hurt your website:
1. Kill that mobile pop-up!
Consider turning your pop-up off on mobile. They hurt your search ranking and give your mobile phone users a poor experience. People find them annoying because they are difficult to exit out of on a smartphone. If you do get a user to enter their email information, they are often not interested in your product or service. They are low-quality leads.
Google’s product is a search engine. They want people to navigate and find the information they are looking for. If they send visitors to your site and hit a pop-up that is annoying gives a bad experience. The mad web searcher will leave the site with a poor result. Google will lower a website’s search ranking if you have a pop-up on mobile as a result. Kill your mobile pop-up and increase your ranking and your visitor’s user experience.
Happy web visitors equals higher conversion!
An alternative to the pop-up is the slide-in from either the top or bottom of your screen. Allow the user to continue to read the page they were wanting. The leads you get from a slide-in are higher quality despite their lower conversion rate. Why fill up your email-marketing list with people that are not interested in what you’re saying?
Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible. This can be problematic on mobile devices where screens are often smaller. To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.
Source: Google Developers Blog
2. Your website is not secure
Google made the move last year to make the Internet a “safer place”. As a result not having an SSL certificate on your website will rank you lower in search results. Some hosting companies provide free SSL certificates. Here’s an article I wrote on how to further optimize your website.
3. You have a Slider on your website
Sliders were a huge trend several years ago. Some websites and I am guilty of installing a few, still, have them. There are many problems with sliders. Here are a few:
Low conversion rate – dismal, less than 2%. Visitors are becoming so desensitized to ads that they don’t even notice them. They slow your site down and hurt your SEO.
Sliders use Javascript every time the page loads. Having high-resolution images on your website increases load time. Patience is not a common trait in the online world. Visitors want websites to load fast and if they have to wait – they bounce. If you have a local business website, this checklist might be useful in your planning.
Visitors are becoming so desensitized to ads that they don’t even notice them.
You’re giving up a prime real estate area.
Sliders are usually placed in the above-the-fold area, which is a prime real estate area of your business website. Don’t waste it on a low converting slider. Sliders are not mobile-friendly.They’re not mobile-friendly.
In 2018, where online traffic has overtaken desktop, mobile sliders make your website not user-friendly. Again this makes visitors leave.4. No primary goal for your website.
Another valuable business website tip is to plan your website before development. Have a primary goal for your website. Without a primary goal for your website it a useless marketing piece. Before you develop your website create a plan. Read my article on planning your website on GoDaddy Canada’s blog to see why this is important.
5. No CTA
Make it easy for your web visitors to do the action you want them to do and tell them what to do. If you don’t ask, they will leave. Make a plan, ditch the slider and make your business website secure.
By removing unnecessary elements from your website and making a clear call-to-action your business website will perform better and rank higher in search results. What business website tips would you include on this list? I’d love to hear your comments.
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