What is the most important aspect of a website?

If you want a successful business, there are a few things you have to keep in mind, regardless of your industry. These days, one of these things is a great website.

While web design trends come and go, here are ten things that every business website should always have:

What The Best Business Websites Have in Common

Whether you’re a startup or an established business, your website should have these ten elements:

It’s not enough to know what your website is for, everyone who is unfamiliar with your business needs to know as well. When someone lands on your site, two things should instantly be clear: what you do and what you want the visitor to do.

In the case of this business, their purpose (full-service fuel and propane) and what the visitor should do (place an order) are the first things you see when you land on their homepage. There’s no confusion. That is what you want with your website.

2. A Simple Web Address

You don’t have to recreate the wheel when you’re coming up with your web address. You want people to be able to find you easily. Create a simple web address that involves your business’ name so that people can get to your site without having to do too much work.

3. Strong, Professional Branding

Some small businesses underestimate the importance of branding. From your domain name to the colors you choose, everything that represents your business should be cohesive. This helps people identify and remember you. This is what you want if you want a successful business.

Your logo should be professional, not something your nephew’s best friend threw together in Photoshop (unless your nephew’s best friend is a professional graphic designer). The colors, fonts, and imagery on your site should be a reflection of your brand.

This is a great example of a site with clear branding:

As you click through the site, you’ll see the blue and gray color scheme and clean layout. Their website is modern, with a light, airy feeling and all of their imagery are cohesive.

There are a lot of options when it comes to website menus. You can have a drop-down, scroll-triggered, hamburger, the list goes on. It doesn’t matter what type you choose, what’s important is that it makes it easy for visitors to find what they need on your site. Your navigation should be simple and intuitive in both the design and the way the pages are organized.

Take the navigation for Internet Summit:

The most important pages are their own items in the navigation bar and the dropdowns that have the most important supporting information. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for, even at a glance. Remember, people like to find information easily and quickly. The more you can make that happen, the more successful you’ll be.

How do you expect people to contact you if they can’t find your information? You don’t want to lose a potential customer just because they can’t figure out how to reach you. Besides making your contact information easy to find, you also want to give them different ways to contact you. Phone, email, and a website form are all good options.

6. Strong Calls to Action

This goes back to our first point about making your visitor’s next step obvious. A call to action should tell your reader what to do and, if possible, what they’ll get out of doing it.

For example, an accountant might have a call to action like, “Simplify your taxes by scheduling an appointment with us today.” People know what you’re asking them to do and what they’re going to get out of it.

Strategically placing CTAs in your content is another way that you can increase conversions. This simple button is eye-catching without being too intrusive:

You don’t want to bombard people and be too flashy because they may get turned off and click out of your site. You have to find the right balance to draw customers in without being over the top.

7. A Great Mobile Experience

Mobile traffic accounts for approximately half of all web traffic so a good mobile experience is crucial. If your site doesn’t load quickly and provide a good user experience, you’ll lose visitors. Those visitors won’t likely come back because they’ll find another site that gives them a better experience.

You want to be sure your web design agency creates responsive websites. Responsive web design means your site will look and perform well on any device whether it’s a computer, tablet, or phone.

8. Compelling Content

If people are going to visit your website, give them something useful. No one wants to waste time just going through a handful of pages. They want to see valuable content that they can take away with them once they leave your site. Content is the way your website will get traffic, whether that’s through search engines or social media sites.

But you can’t just post anything and call it a day. It’s important that your content is relevant to your customer, informative, and optimized for search engines. Think about what your ideal customer would want to know about your product/services and create pages and blog posts around these topics. As you might have guessed, creating good SEO content isn’t easy. It has to be able to be found. That’s why so many people hire digital marketing agencies to create their content!

9. Rave Reviews

Let’s face it, people read reviews and make many of their decisions based on them. So, if you have rave reviews, you want people to see them when they visit your site. This will give them peace of mind about your business’ reputation. It may also influence them to leave a similar review after they do business with you and have a great experience.

10. Google Analytics

While you can technically have a business website without Google Analytics, we don’t recommend it. Google Analytics gives you an unbelievable amount of information about your website traffic and users. From traffic source to the operating system most used by your visitors and so much more, you’ll learn about your users and better tailor your marketing efforts to them. You can even set up goals like a visitor making a phone call or filling out a contact form and track whether you reach those goals every month (or week).

Best of all? Google Analytics is completely free.

Setting up Google Analytics is relatively simple, but things like goal tracking are a bit trickier. Deciphering all of the data can also be overwhelming, but once you find your way around Analytics (or hire an agency to manage it for you), you’ll wonder what you ever did without it!

If your site is missing one or more of the elements on this list, we can help. TheeDigital has been creating and marketing websites for businesses like yours for over 15 years.  To get started, claim your free site audit or give us a call at 919-341-8901!