What Makes A Great Website?

As a digital marketing agency, we understand the importance of a great website. From its design and functionality to its ability to convert leads, there’s lots that urls can do. I may not be a designer, but having worked in the industry for 4 years, I know what a website should be doing, and how the right mix of content, SEO and CTA’s can make all of the difference. In this post, I present 5 factors that should form the basis of your website strategy.

Brand Awareness

When going on holiday, what are your travel essentials?
Sun cream? A good book? Well, whilst these are usually in our top holiday purchases they’re not quite compulsory! Your passport however is the flying essential so that airport security can identify who you are. Why am I discussing this you’re asking yourself? Well, this is because whether you’re an SME or a blue-chip organisation, you should think of your website as the passport to your company brand. Having as much information you have to offer on your website can help new and returning customers understand as much about you as possible, and this is simple brand awareness.

Content is King

In 1996, Bill Gates wrote that ‘Content is King,’ and what he meant by this was that the success of a website all depends on the content that you can find on it. After seeing an ad, finding you on the SERP or hearing about you from a friend, the first thing customers will do is head to your website to learn more about you, before making any decision whether to either get in touch or purchase from you. So, the content on-site must be meeting the demands of the users and optimised properly for search engines like Google.

Types of useful content on websites include:
Case studies/ testimonials of previous work.
A detailed ‘About Us’ page.
A ‘Meet The Team’ page for users to create a sense of personalisation.
A ‘Blog’ page for the team to consistently write about industry topics to give added value to the readers. This also enables you as a business to become ‘thought leaders’, which is useful, as Hubspot claims, ‘96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders’.

Social Media Links

In today’s society, pretty much every company has their own social media profiles, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Instagram… By having these, not only are you raising your company’s profile but you now also have the opportunity to add these social links to your website and vice versa. In terms of SEO, Google loves this due to there being a direct correlation between quality/quantity of links to your site and how much search traffic your site receives. For small businesses, more links = more search traffic = more customers.

SEO Rankings

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and this is important for every single live website. One of its key goals is to make your website content more attractive to search engines so that when users are searching for keywords, google will be able to identify your website as answering the query and thus rank your website in the top pages for that search term, ultimately providing you with more organic traffic to your website. Relating back to our ‘Content is King’ section you can now see why these two go hand in hand together.

Contact details & Enquiries

Your website is not only a really good way to showcase your company, team and work but it is also a great way drive customers to your store or calling to make an enquiry for a service. Small details like opening times, address and contact details is a really nice way of driving offline traffic. For some companies it may be beneficial for you to have a quick and easy contact form on your website in order to track how many enquiries your website is generating.

After discussing the above, you can see that there are lots of ways to make your website great! Whether you already have all of the above in place but just need that little bit of extra advice and guidance, or maybe your website is running low on content and SEO. Here at Embryo we can offer you guidance and ways to improve your website rankings. Call us today on 0161 327 2635 and one of our members of the team will be happy to chat to you, alternatively you can email us at [email protected].