A good company website can have many benefits, from improved brand awareness to additional leads and even increased sales. To experience these benefits, your website must employ the latest trends and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Whether your website has been up for years or just a few months, there are always ways it can be improved.
As a digital marketing expert, Michel Bernard knows the importance of a polished and optimized website. Michel started his career in marketing as a copywriter. He worked for various ad firms in Toronto, gaining invaluable experience from some of the most talented professionals in the industry. Today, his digital marketing firm provides top quality, creative marketing solutions to individuals and business owners in the Gatineau/Outaouais region of Quebec. He shares his top tips for improving your company website.
There’s nothing more frustrating than visiting a website that doesn’t list a company’s current products or opening hours. To guarantee visitors will be able to find the information they are looking for, make a point of updating the content on your website regularly. Michel Bernard suggests reviewing your most important content, such as product listings and hours of operation, on a monthly basis.
This will ensure that consumers can find the most up-to-date and relevant information and, in turn, will improve traffic, decrease the bounce rate, and improve SEO. Most importantly, providing users with updated information will promote a positive user experience.
One of the most important aspects of a good website is that it is user-friendly. Not only does this positively impact the user experience, but a user-friendly website will also contribute to increased search engine rankings. To make your website more user-friendly, focus on developing simple navigation. Visitors should be able to find exactly what they’re looking for quickly and easily. If they are unable to do so, they will likely leave the site.
This can result in decreased traffic and a higher bounce rate, neither of which is ideal for search engine optimization. Your website should also be eye-catching and engaging. Michel Bernard notes that consistency is important when designing or improving your website. When making changes, you should always make sure that the language, graphics, and colors used throughout your site are consistent.
In addition to being consistent throughout your website, these aspects should also be consistent on your other digital marketing platforms and, most importantly, with your brand image and voice. Ensuring consistency will signal to users that they are still on the same site, as they move from page to page. Brand consistency will also indicate to visitors that they are on the official site for your business. Inconsistency can result in a high bounce rate, as visitors will tend to leave as soon as they are unsure about the site and its contents.
Consumers will have a hard time visiting your website if it’s difficult to find. This is where search engine optimization comes in. It’s the job of a search engine to sift through the millions of websites online and to show users exactly what they’re looking for. If you want your website to be easy to find, then it’s important to keep SEO factors in mind when building or updating your site.
In general, you want to make sure that your website and its contents are informative, easy to read, and contain keywords that relate to your business. Internal linking, external links, headings, and descriptive page titles, and other metadata are all important factors. Additional technical aspects, such as page speed and HTML to text ratio, are also important. Michel Bernard suggests consulting a digital marketing firm that specializes in SEO to ensure your site is optimized for search engines.
Ensuring your website is optimized for mobile devices is important for both user experience and search engines. Today, search engines like Google strongly emphasize the importance of mobile optimization. In fact, Google will now penalize sites that are not found to be responsive. This is due to the fact that so many people use their mobile devices to browse the internet. If a website is not optimized for smaller devices, consumers will find it difficult to view and will likely leave the site immediately.
To guarantee that your site is mobile-friendly and appears correctly on various screen sizes and web browsers, Michel Bernard suggests testing it on your personal devices, as well as any other devices you can get your hands on. Website owners can also use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check that their site displays properly on mobile devices.
One of the main goals of your website should be to have clients and potential customers contact you directly. Therefore, it’s important that you make your contact information easy to find. In addition to making it simpler for consumers to contact you, providing accessible contact details also helps search engines.
When you provide consistent contact details on all of your digital marketing mediums, it’s much easier for search engines to pull up your site when someone is looking for a business like yours in the area. Michel Bernard suggests putting your email, phone number, and even a simple contact form on your home page. Many businesses will put this information at the top of their home page or in the footer. This makes the information simple and easily accessible.
People can be impatient when it comes to technology. This is true for website loading times as well. In fact, site visitors will wait just a couple of seconds before moving on if your site doesn’t load. Therefore, it’s important to optimize your website so that it loads quickly. In addition to creating a better user experience, load time is also an important factor for search engines. Slow loading sites often have high bounce rates and reduced traffic.
To search engines it appears that users are not happy with the content. Search rankings therefore decrease. To make sure your site loads as quickly as possible, keep things simple — avoid excessive animation and large image and video files. Michel Bernard recommends checking on your site’s loading time using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool. This tool will analyze your webpage, provide a performance score, and give you suggestions for how to improve the loading time of the page.
To promote conversions on your site, it’s important to include straightforward and eye-catching calls to action. A call to action asks visitors to take a specific action on your site. For instance, a button reading “Save Money Now” could be a call to action that entices users to sign up for a promotion. Calls to action should be placed strategically throughout your site. Action words should also be used in the copy.
Michel Bernard points out that small details can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of a call to action. For instance, the color of a button can significantly change the willingness of site visitors to click on it. To be certain that you are using the best placement, wording, and color for your call to action, try testing out different alternatives. This form of testing, known as A/B testing, will help you determine which option will provide the highest engagement.
If you are interested in even more technology-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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