Making it easy for your customers to use and navigate your business’s website is no easy feat. But that’s exactly what you need to do if you want to win customers and clients in the digital age. In fact, with 88% of consumers unlikely to return to a website after one bad experience, it’s imperative that your website is easy to navigate, useful, and above-all user-friendly to ensure your website is winning customers, not losing them.
Having a website that has a good website design and functionality is even more important for e-Commerce sites – businesses that sell products or services online or over the phone. Since your product can only be found and purchased online, having a website that’s well designed and performs well can be paramount to your business’s success.
Fortunately, there are many things you can do to improve your website’s design and functionality, and, in so doing, maximize your sales in the process. Here are a few top tips to consider.
1. Make It Easy for Your Customers to Find What They’re Looking For
If your site makes finding your services, contact page, or about page hard to find, your potential customers likely aren’t going to spend a ton of time looking for them. Instead, many of them are going to simply leave your site, and take their business elsewhere. Sad but true. In an age where customer attention spans are shorter now than they have ever been, making it easy for your customers to find what they’re looking for is critical. It can be the difference between a visitor leaving your site in frustration or making an immediate purchase.
By organizing your site the way your customers would expect – by using appropriately labeled navigation and service pages – you can ensure that your site presents information in an organized way. This can enable your customers to more easily find what they’re looking for – be it a product or service, or simply your phone number or email – and be more likely to convert (or revisit your site) in the process.
Hiring a professional marketer can help you with this process, by conducting market research on your customers, and identifying what ‘keywords’ they use to find your services. By using their words to describe your services, you can help them find what they’re looking for with minimal fuss.
2. Make Your Site Mobile-Friendly
Customers browse the net and shop around on their phones and tablets as much, if not more than they do on their desktop PCs, so making your mobile-friendly is essential.
Need a quick refresher? (No problem.) Having a ‘mobile-friendly site’ is what it means to have a website that’s optimized for mobile devices. This means that, while your customers are browsing their site on a mobile device like a smartphone or a tablet, your website remains as functional as ever. When making your site mobile-friendly, you want to ensure that everything is organized – that layouts continue to maintain their intuitive structure, even when scaled down on a small screen, and that nothing is hidden from view. You also want to make sure that your pictures remain clear and vibrant (even on retina screens) and that text is still readable (with no zooming required).
Forewarning: Keep in mind that designing a mobile-friendly site without the help of a web developer is tricky business. If you don’t know what you’re doing and you have a custom site, you can incidentally crash your site or worse. It’s best to hire a pro for this one.
3. Include a Contact Page and a FAQ Page
You’d be surprised at how many businesses forget to include a simple way for their customers to contact them, let alone find answers to their most frequently asked questions (or FAQs). If that’s you, it’s best to hop on it, as soon as you can.
Shopping for products or services online can be a very intimidating (and stressful) experience for many people—particularly those who didn’t grow up using computers. If they have a question or a concern and they can’t reach you, let alone find an answer to their question, many will leave your site never to return. Don’t be that someone. Creating a simple contact page with up-to-date information can be one of the easiest and best investments you can make on your way to improving your overall website design and functionality.
The same goes for an FAQ page. By answering the questions your customers are most likely to ask—such as information regarding pricing, shipping, delivery dates, business hours, and more—you can help lessen your customer’s anxieties and minimize their inquiries (giving your sales and customer service reps some slack in the process). Moreover, by building trust with your customers upfront, you can increase your chances that those who are ‘on the fence’ will make a purchase and be more satisfied when they do.
Bonus Tip: Hire a Professional
While improving your website design and functionality are relatively easy with a little know-how, it can be a time-consuming and tedious process if you don’t. After all, knowing what to do is entirely different from knowing how to do it.
Fortunately, many modern digital marketing agencies employ dozens of first-rate web developers and quality web designers who can help take your outdated website and transform it into something new. A professional can also help implement all of the aforementioned tips and techniques – such as improving your site’s navigation, making it mobile-friendly, and optimizing its many service pages – to make it fit for the digital age and beyond. They can also make recommendations to improve your site’s speed, usability, legibility, layout, and design. Talk about a great investment!
If you’re stuck or overwhelmed trying to improve your website design or functionality, don’t wait! Contact Hercules SEO today to schedule a free consultation and find out how our seasoned professionals can transform your site for the better.