You proudly launched your new website. Now, 5 years later, you are realising that it is just there, yet, really not doing anything for your brand.
Back then you learned you had to have a website. The reality is that today many websites are sub-optimal. What was cutting edge 5-10 years ago is no longer enough. Here we describe the three website essentials to help you get something out of your website. We avoid getting too technical.
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3 website essentials
- Create a good user experience – More than 60% of content is now consumed on mobile. This means your website must have a responsive theme design. Design content with a mobile-first mentality. Google ranks sites with a good user experience higher. The user responsive is more than just being mobile friendly. Google also rewards sites that are secure, meaning they have an SSL certificate (https).
- Provide remarkable content – Your site visitors must find content that is valuable to them, rather than what is important to you. If you can’t find the information you are seeking on a website, would you ever visit it again? Maybe not. Your website target audiences are called personas. How deeply do you understand your personas? Your website should provide regular new content that resonates with your customers (personas). Pay attention to text quality with Grammarly and Hemingway Editor.
- Help your customers to find you – Having great content is still only half the story. Your customers (personas) need to be able to find it. There are several complementary ways to achieve this. Your content needs to be amplified through offsite (social media) channels to drive traffic back to your website. This is one of the reasons why onsite blogs continue to be popular. The site needs to be optimised for search engines by using keywords, meta descriptions, and image alt-text. Once people have found you, be sure they can contact you and make an effort to interact with them, in a timely fashion.
Principles of building online authority
- We have kept this post intentionally concise. There is so much more that can be said on this topic. Click through to the resource page for further reading and recommended links.
READ MORE ONLINE AUTHORITY RESOURCES AND LINKS
Case Study
In a recent case study, we identified an organisation that had given up on its website and resorted to Facebook. They are not alone.
Images copyright of Igor Miske on Unsplash
