Simply having a website is not enough. If you want to generate a positive ROI, you need an effective website that attracts the right visitors and converts those clicks into monetizable traffic.
The question is, where do you start? Here are a few suggestions.
5 Components of Effective Websites
1. Well-Defined Purpose and Goal
Quick: What’s the purpose of your website? And what is your primary conversion goal? What about secondary conversion goals?
If you can’t answer questions like these, you need to spend some more time at the proverbial “drawing board” until you have a coherent strategy in place. Everything – including your design and content – will intersect these answers.
2. Clear Understanding of Target Audience
Most business owners make the mistake of assuming their website is all about their brand. But that’s simply not true. A good website is all about the visitor. Your website should be designed and developed in a way that it speaks the language of your target audience.
Give a good website builder 10 hours to create a site and they’ll spend eight hours researching the target audience and 2 hours building. You should do the same. Get intimately familiar with who your visitors are and develop a site that appeals to them.
3. Optimized UX
Spend time optimizing your user experience (UX) so that people enjoy being on your website and are highly engaged. One way to do this is by making sure your website has a high degree of readability. (This is essentially a measurement of how easy it is for people to understand what’s on your website.)
As Wix explains, “Sufficient contrast between your text color and background color is important for readability, as well as for website accessibility. While your website color scheme is likely to be representative of your brand colors, make sure that there’s sufficient contrast between your elements.”
Other key factors include legible fonts, appropriate font sizes, and a clear hierarchy of content. The most important elements should be at the top, to get the most value out of every click without forcing visitors to scroll.
4. High-Value Content
Content is the currency of a good site. It’s how you bring people in and engage them (ultimately turning them into monetizable clicks).
Good content is tactical and valuable to your reader. (This is why it’s so important to research your audience. Once you understand who your readers are and what they want, you can develop content that appeals to their specific interests, desires, and goals.)
Don’t focus on quantity of content as much as you focus on quality. It’s better to have one high quality piece of content that’s informative and engaging every single week than five pieces of fluffy content designed to take up space.
5. Strong SEO Strategy
If you want your website to work for your brand around the clock, it needs to be findable. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) becomes so important.
“Search engines are smart, but they still need help to recognize your site as an authority in its niche,” Green Residential explains. “There are several things you can do to optimize your site, such as using plugins that naturally optimize SEO, putting relevant and useful keywords in headlines and title tags, formatting your content so it looks professional, and increasing the speed of your website.”
You can think of a good SEO strategy as the foundation of your website. Everything can look good on the surface, but without a strong SEO foundation in place, the site will eventually crumble.
Tracking and Analyzing Your Website Performance
It’s not enough to build a website – you have to keep track of its performance to understand how visitors are interacting with your site.
There are numerous analytics tools available that provide valuable insights into your website’s performance, such as Google Analytics, which is widely used and free.
The key to analytics is not just collecting data, but also interpreting it and making necessary adjustments based on your findings. For example, if you find that visitors are leaving your site quickly (a high bounce rate), it might indicate that your site is difficult to navigate, or your content isn’t engaging.
Measuring and understanding the right metrics will help you tweak and improve your website, ensuring that it serves your purpose effectively while providing value for your visitors. Remember, the goal is to create an enjoyable user experience that keeps visitors coming back for more. By regularly analyzing your site, you give yourself the best chance of long-term success.
