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Everyone wants their website to look great. And I get it. When our websites look good, we look good. And we feel confident driving traffic to it.
But often we get too caught up in how a website looks and we neglect everything else.
Your website is not a piece of art to be looked at and admired, it’s a tool that should be used to drive action – usually by delivering leads and sales.
So although strange of us as web designers to say, we need to stop obsessing over how our websites look and start thinking about how they’ll drive leads.
There are actually 6 elements that make a great website, and all these need to be carefully balanced. In this episode, we’ll go through exactly what those 6 elements are, and how you can apply them to your website.
In this episode, you learn…
- The 6 key elements that lead to website success
- How to balance these elements across your website
- Quick wins to make your website that bit better – and get more sales!
Resources
54 Ways To Increase Your Website Sales
The 6 Key Elements that Make a Successful Website: Transcript
Welcome to Episode 42 of the Make Your Mark Online Podcast. Today we’re going to be talking about the 6 elements that make the perfect website.
But before we get into that, this show is sponsored by the Make Your Mark Online Community, this is our signature membership community where we help small business owners build and grow a successful website.
So on with the show!
Everyone wants their website to look great. And I get it. When our websites look good, we look good. And we feel confident driving traffic to it.
But often we get too caught up in how a website looks and we neglect everything else.
Your website is not a piece of art to be looked at and admired, it’s a tool that should be used to drive action – usually by delivering leads and sales.
So although strange of us as web designers to say, we need to stop obsessing over how our websites look and start thinking about how they’ll drive leads.
There are actually 6 elements that make a great website, and all these need to be carefully balanced.
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User Experience
User experience is the biggie. Above all else, this should be your main focus when building your website.
We want our user’s to know exactly where they need to go on your website to get what they are looking for.
One of the key places to do this is your homepage. We like to think of your homepage as the reception area of your website. A reception area of a busy building gets lots of questions, where are the lifts (or elevators as you may call them), where are the loos, I need to speak to sucha body. That’s what your users need from your homepage – where’s your blog, I want to contact you, I want to find more about sucha service.
And like any good reception area, your homepage needs to efficiently direct people to the right place on your website. And quickly.
You do not want people congregating around your reception area, trying to understand where to go. Because they will just leave.And that’s just one example of something you have to consider when it comes to user-experience. There are so many things to think about – do your call to action buttons (so your ‘find out more’ or ‘contact me’) buttons stand out, do you have images that reflect what the text says, is there plenty of white space on the page, can the user flow through your website with ease?
As web designers this sort of becomes automatic. But when you’re DIYing your website, you have to constantly question yourself – is this easy for the end-user to understand and use?
The reason a lot of people get this wrong – and that includes big, fancy agencies – is because they focus too much on how the website looks. If you go on many high-fashion websites you’ll find this is the case, it’s all just too pretentious to actually be user-friendly.
2. Website copy
Yes, you can have a beautiful website but if the words on the page don’t connect with your reader then no amount of beauty will make up for it. Like when you discover that really hot person you’ve liked for ages actually doesn’t have any personality. That’s the same thing, it’s all very disappointing.
People most often get their website copy wrong just because, they don’t really think about it. They just start typing without consciously thinking about the reader, what their problems are and why they’re on your website.
A lot of people also copy off their competition, and often the competition doesn’t know how to write website copy either. So everyone just ends up with…crap website copy.
I think the problem is people tend to overcomplicate website copy. But it really shouldn’t be difficult. As business owners, we speak to people about our products or services every day. We’re able to articulate what we do and what the benefits of our products or services are verbally. All you need to do is to write it down.
Some major things to get right with website copy is making sure people know exactly what you do as soon as they land on your homepage. And you can do this by coming up with what we call a big, bold statement, which essentially summarises what you do. We have recorded a podcast about this and written a blog post about it and we’ll pop this in the shownotes.
Another thing is making having a page for each service you offer and making sure you include everything about that service so your reader can make an informed decision about whether to work with you – so the benefits of the service, the cost, FAQ, the process and previous testimonials.
Finally, it’s about not overthinking the writing. You constantly have to balance copy with user-experience and SEO. This is why calling things like ‘My Journey’ instead of about page is a bad idea because it’s just confusing for your user.
And calling your service a funny name that Google won’t understand will not help you rank on Google. For example, calling an editing service ‘the wondrous wizard package’ just doesn’t make sense. You have to kind of balance creativity with, well, what your readers and search engines will understand.
3. Content Marketing
There’s zero point having a beautiful, user-friendly website without getting traffic to it. It’s like the perfect shop stuck in the middle of the dessert. Sorry, I’m all about the bad metaphors today, you’re just going to have to bear with that.
The problem is, people try content marketing but they produce what we call ‘fluff’ content. So that’s ‘look at this client we’ve just landed’ or ‘look at this award we’ve won’ or even very basic ‘7 ways to blah, blah, blah’ posts. Now these aren’t always bad but sometimes they’re just very basic overviews of a topic that have less than 500 words. They don’t really give the reader any value.
But content marketing isn’t just about driving traffic to your site, it’s about building trust and authority. It’s about answering those questions that none of your competition will answer. It’s about being the go-to person for your particular topic.
If it’s done correctly, content can deliver more leads and sales but it can also deliver better customers, the ones who are the right fit for you.
Some of the major mistakes people make when it comes to content marketing is not answering a question. They skim the surface of a topic but don’t delve in and try to give the best, most informed, most researched answer.
But even when people do, do this what they then fail to promote their content. You need to spend a lot of time getting eyeballs on your content.
Finally, people don’t produce content for every step of the sales process. They focus on ‘awareness content’ – basically making people aware that they exist and that they are knowledgable. But people rarely produce content about their products or services. And this is a huge error. That’s why we produce so many blog posts about our products or services. In fact, we’ve just had one out this week called, Why we charge large companies more for a website redesign.
4. Lead Generation
By lead generation, I mean collecting email addresses or getting people to get in contact with you or book a call.
Now there are usually two camps when it comes to lead gen…
Those who make zero effort to capture leads
Those who harras you so much for your email address on your website that if they were an actual person you’d probably call the police
If you haven’t yet guessed, what we’re after is somewhere between the two.
The reason you can’t harass someone is that it’s just not good user-experience. And good relationships aren’t built by stalking people unless your that weird bloke off 50 shades of grey.
Equally, saying nothing won’t get you anywhere either.
Now, there are ways of capturing email address or getting people to get in contact with you without being annoying and I actually talk about that in my last podcast episode. But offering things like content upgrades to your blog posts such as helpful checklists or planners to go alongside the topic you’re talking about is a great way of doing this.
Using a sticky hello bar at the top of the page if you’ve got a webinar coming up or something new and exacting is another.
Including a contact form on every single service page is also one.
So you see, you don’t have to be Christian Grey to get leads. You can do it respectfully.
5. Appearance
Okay, so I harped on about how appearance is not all that. But it is something. No, your website doesn’t have to be a victoria secret model but it does help if it’s ya know, showered and put on clean underwear. Your website has to be presentable, easy to use, and yes, have good images and easy to read text as a minimum.
The biggest mistakes we see websites make when it comes to appearance is one, it looks like the 90s has thrown up on the page. Or 2. They copy everyone else.
You see it all the time. Look at the IT industry. Every website looks exactly the same. They use a lot of blues, oranges and whites. And they have a lot of stock photos of people wearing headsets.
The problem is, people won’t remember you.
With your appearance, you generally have to use good images and this is exactly why we recommend people invest in a photographer before they get a website.
You have to make sure you use plenty of white space, so give your text and images room to breath don’t squash things in so close together.
You also have to break things up into sections, particularly on your homepage where everything can feel a bit crowded. So dedicate one section of the page to just about you with an image, dedicate the next section to just your content. Don’t try to cram in testimonials next to your about you text with several images, it just looks and feels messy.
6. SEO
The next thing is SEO. Now the basics of SEO is just good user-experience mixed with website admin. For most of us, this is pretty much all we need to know.
One huge mistake business owners make is worrying too much about SEO and going way to deep with it all that they actually forget about their actual business.
Another thing to remember is that producing content on your website i.e. blogging is also a great way to rank for the questions that people ask you.
So don’t overcomplicate it for now.
But there are some rules you want to follow, such as using your H tags correctly. H tags are essentially your headings on the page. You H1 tag tells Google what the entire page is about, H2 tells Google what the following paragraph is about, and if that paragraph is broken down further you’ll use H3 and so on. This is actually just good user-experience to break up the text and tell the user what the next section is about. It’s just you’re telling Google at the same time.
And you may want to do some keyword research too, and drop these keywords naturally – the key word here is naturally- throughout your copy and your headings too.
In your blog posts, you’ll want to link to other relevant content. And you’ll want to make sure you give all your images appropriate names.
You want to keep your URLs short.
Now, if you’re furiously typing don’t worry you can stop I do have a checklist for this that I’ll put in the show-notes or you can also check out our blog post on how to make the perfect website.
Conclusion
So there you have it, the 6 key things that will make your website a success – user-experience, website copy, content marketing, lead generation, seo and appearance.
Now, remember this can seem overwhelming but you’ll get this right over time. No website is perfect. Ours isn’t perfect. I could visit our website right now and pick at things. But if you have an awareness of these 6 things, and consciously implement them when you work on your website, I guarantee it will be that bit more successful.
So I hope you found this episode useful.
And if you’re wanting to learn more about how to grow your website so it acts as the best salesperson for your business, then check out our membership community, Make Your Mark Online. We actually create one-click-install website pages for our members such as the homepage, about page or even things like lead capture pages and sales pages. These are built with our knowledge and experience so a lot of what’s been talked about in this podcast episode such as user-experience or appearance has already been covered.
If that sounds good head to makeyourmarkonline.net to find out more.
So that’s it for today’s episode, we’ll see you next time on the Make your make online podcast.
The post Ep 42- The 6 Elements That Make a Successful Website appeared first on Content Marketing & SEO Agency | Get More Sales From Your Website.