1. Professional, stunning, beautiful design
A great looking website will add loads of credibility to your business. On the flip side, there's nothing worse than a shoddy, homemade looking website which reflects poorly on the business. Your website has to LOOK really good.2. User friendly design
Not only must your website look really good, but it needs to be easy to use. "Intuitive" is always the word that we use in the industry. Here's some important things your website should do when someone pulls it up for the first time:- Load quickly
- Make it easy for the user to know what to do through call to action buttons
- VERY easy to contact business (either by phone number at the top or lead form on home page)
- No errors in functionality or content
- Easy to click from page to page
Even if your website looks great, if users get frustrated by it then it won't be effective.
3. Search engine friendly
Search engines offer nearly unlimited potential to your website traffic. A site we launched recently is now receiving almost 90% of it's total traffic through the search engines. If your website isn't getting any traffic through search engines than something needs to be fixed.
There are a lot of things you can do to get more search engine traffic even without hiring a professional, providing you can edit your own website. The most important way (and least technical), is adding more content to your website. So if your business is lawn care, write a page that talks about how to get your grass to grow in the fall. Search engines love that type of thing.
A few other ways to make your website more search engine friendly are:
- Using text instead of images
- Having descriptive title tags
- Linking to your site from social media
- Putting important keywords in your main header (h1) tag
If you want to read about some more SEO tips in detail you can read our Easy SEO Checklist article.
We hope these 3 Keys to Effective Websites help you and your business. The important thing is to remember to evaluate your website regularly on all three aspects. It takes worth but it's worth it!
