Building a website is easily one of the most important steps in promoting a business in the modern digital economy. Just having a website, though, isn’t enough. Your site should be useful to your customers and help them make the decision to purchase your product or service. Here are four tips to creating an awesome site that will actually be of use to your customer base.
Start with Good Site Design
Few things are as frustrating to a website visitor as a site that is poorly laid out and difficult to navigate. If customers can’t find what they’re looking for easily, it’s a strong possibility that they’ll leave your site and look elsewhere. For this reason, you need to start your website with strong site design. You can have your site designed specifically for you, or use any number of templates for platforms like WordPress that will give it a smooth, professional-looking layout.
Answer Customer Questions
When people go looking for products and services, there are bound to be questions they want answered. If you can anticipate those questions and answer them on your site, you’ll be able to provide immense value to potential customers and make them more likely to buy from you. Say, for example, you were selling computer peripherals. Customers often have questions about wireless and Bluetooth connectivity and compatibility with such products. Answering these questions in blog posts or even on the product pages themselves will help generate trust with prospective buyers.
Include Geographically Targeted Pages
If you operate a service-based business that has branches in multiple cities or regions, it’s important to create specific pages for your locations in each area. This will help your customers find you through location-specific search engine queries, which will in turn help you generate more business. Bekins Van Lines Inc is a great example of how to do this correctly. The company’s website page for moving services in south Florida is optimized not only for regional searches, but also for specific major city names within that region. Along with that, it provides a map of that can show potential customers where their store locations are so that they can be more accessible.
Include a Contact Form
One of the best ways to make a website helpful to your customers is to include a simple contact form for questions and inquiries. By making it easy to fill out one form on one page, you can generate more outreach from potential customers. If you’re good at direct selling, you can then recommend products and services based on each customer’s personal needs and increase the number of sales you make.
Building a great website will take time and thought, but it’s not a difficult process. If you get stuck, just try to put yourself in the place of a customer. When you shop online, what do you look for and how do you decide on a provider? By asking yourself these questions, you can anticipate the needs of real customers and make your site better for them.