Websites are certainly no longer a novel concept by any stretch of the imagination. Internet Live Statistics states that there are more than 1 trillion websites currently online. That’s more than a single person could view during their lifetime.
This of course presents a unique challenge to businesses. With so many websites online, how can a single site rise towards the top and attract customers? While there are different strategies you can use to get attention from the web, the best course of action is to ensure that you have an effective website in the first place. However, what makes a website effective? Below are five tips for improving the effectiveness of your website.
Mobile Optimize Your Website
How people surf the web to find websites has changed forever. No longer do the majority of internet users connect to the web via personal computers and laptops. Today, mobile platforms like tablets and especially smartphones reign supreme in the market. In fact, mobile phones now account for well over 50 percent of all website traffic. For example, if you wanted to find a health program but didn’t know where to start you could search “le-vel thrive reviews” to see what people say about the program which creates traffic.
Knowing that, you need to make sure your website is mobile optimized for it to be effective in the current marketplace. Test your website on different mobile platforms to ensure that the navigation is easy and intuitive for mobile users. If it isn’t, you have a serious problem.
Search Engine Optimize Your Website
Search engine optimization is also vitally important to crafting an effective website. If your website doesn’t have good SEO, it may be impossible to find on search engines like Google and Bing. Search engines are still the number one tool people use to find websites. In fact, about 6.6 billion internet searches are made every day. If you get punished by Google’s search engine algorithms, it can take a huge bite out of your traffic.
Provide Foreign Language Translation for Text, Audio and Video
You also need to be aware that today’s internet landscape is much more multinational than it has ever been at any point in the past. You should be aware that most internet traffic does not in fact come from the United States anymore. 2016 statistics on internet users state that the two biggest users of the internet are China and India with over 721 million and 462 million internet users each. The US comes in third behind those two with about 287 million.
With this in mind, you need to make your website and website content available in different languages or you’ll be neglecting very large chunks of the market. Consider publishing foreign language versions of your site that load automatically for foreign internet providers. Also take advantage of audio description companies that can provide you with foreign language subtitles for videos and other web-content and translation for audio content.
Focus on Good Web-Design Principles
Your website also needs to have good web-design principles. Is your website easy to navigate? If visitors have trouble figuring out how to navigate from page to page, you’re going to encounter a high bounce rate. Similarly, pages that are too busy and do not take advantage of negative space to focus attention on important content and links will also scare away users. Make good web-design a priority.
Relate to Your Actual Audience
A lot of websites published by companies are designed with the business world and office environment in mind. They have a sterile design aesthetic that can be off-putting to anyone else outside the business world. They tend to include jargon and buzzwords that sound annoying and pretentious to a layperson. If your website is not aimed at business people and instead is aimed at actual consumers, cater to that audience. Design your pages and content in a way that will please the preferences of the people who will actually buy your products.
Overall, creating an effective website does not occur on its own. It requires a lot of hard work and strategic thinking to craft a site that is able to reach the audience you want to reach and convince them to buy your products and services. Use the five tips listed above to help make this possible.
