Having a business website in today's day and age is non-negotiable. A great website serves as your most dedicated and consistent salesperson. And with the right touch, you can make it your best one too. That’s why we don't view the cost associated with a business website as an expenditure. Rather, it's an investment.
With a website, you can grow your brand to reach new customers, generate more leads and ultimately increase revenues. And just having a website for the sake of having a website isn’t going to cut it. As we’ll get into later in this post, your consumers seriously judge your company based on the usability and design of your website. Your search rankings are even impacted by it –big time. Those two factors can ultimately result in lost business. That’s why the quality of your business website is so important in today's digital age.
At the end of the day, your website directly affects your bottom line. Let’s find out why, and how you can use this to your advantage.
Consumer Behavior & Opinions
Your business website needs to conform to the reality of consumer behavior today: Nearly two-thirds of website traffic comes from mobile devices today. That means your website needs to be responsive and look great on all devices. But don’t just take our word for it.
Even on the local business level, 83% of consumers expect a business to have a mobile-friendly website. And if you don’t, you’re in trouble. 57% of all mobile users will not recommend a business if their mobile website is poorly designed or unresponsive.
Now, the businesses that do have a great mobile set themselves up for much more success. In the same survey, 61% of consumers said they were more likely to contact a business with a good mobile site.
Contact turns into leads, which if nurtured right can turn into sales. The message is clear. Just based on consumer expectations and how they’re using the internet today, your website has never mattered more.
Your website is the modern day storefront of your business. And today, the customer experience begins as soon as the first page loads. By investing in a high-quality business website, you heighten the image of your brand in the consumer's eyes.
Your Search Rankings Depend on It
Google now ranks the mobile version of your business website ahead of its desktop to determine your search position. That means, its algorithm is placing a higher weight on the mobile version of your website and less on the desktop. So if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re taking a huge hit in rankings.
How important is ranking high on Google? Well, we’ll just leave this stat here: Google is responsible for 94% of total organic traffic. That means 94% of all non-ad driven traffic to websites first comes through Google.
Google has effectively become the homepage of the internet. That means you need an SEO strategy to get your business website to rank high in the search rankings so consumers will find you online. But you can’t even begin to start executing on that strategy until you have a solid business website already in place. Why? Well, because so much of your search rankings depend on the quality of your website.
One of the biggest factors is your website's loading speed. Google uses this as one of its top metrics for ranking websites. If your website doesn't load fast on both mobile and desktop, it’ll be very hard to rank. But it doesn't stop there.
Other SEO factors affected by your website is its security. Are you using an SSL certificate? And also its mobile usability. Search engines specifically rank websites based on their responsiveness, mobile menu usability, proportional text, and well-spaced elements. You need to have all of this in place before you can create a content strategy aimed at building domain authority and ranking on Google.
Think of your website as the foundation for which your search engine optimization strategy is built upon. Without a solid foundation in place, even the most brilliant SEO strategists would be severely hampered.
It Makes Your Marketing More Effective by Increasing Leads
Think of your business website as a home base. You want all of your digital marketing activities to revolve around it, and you also want to constantly be steering users towards it. Why? If a user is on your website, they already have shown a solid level of interest because they most likely came there through a referral source (social media, search, etc.). It’s unlikely that they’re typing in your domain name directly.
That also means they were likely searching for a business like yours or looking at content related to your industry before landing on your site. This means that they could be in the market to purchase your product or service.
Once you’ve got them on your website, you want to convert them from a prospect to a sales lead. Now, how do you do that? Well, it starts with recognizing one unique aspect of websites. And that is, a website is a place that you alone own and you don’t have to compete for attention.
With other platforms like social media on YouTube and Google, you have to compete with multiple different brands for attention. And they’re all trying they’re best to capture it. The competition is stiff. With a website, it’s just you.
Your company gets the chance to advertise their services with stunning images, engaging copy, bold typography, customer testimonials and an awesome design that can communicate your offerings. From there, you can build out landing pages and funnel sections of your audience toward them.
The landing page is where you convert users. A conversion is any sort of action you want users to take on your website that brings them one step closer to becoming a customer. The conversion objective depends on your business type. For example, as a web design agency, one of the top conversions we aim for is driving users to sign up for a consultation. That brings them one step closer to eventually becoming a client. If they are converted, you will have their contact info.
Again, what you do with this depends on your business type. You could reach out to them directly or you could enroll them in a drip email marketing campaign that aims to convert them over time. In general, we like going in with zero assumptions and testing everything to see what works and what doesn’t. From there, we optimize our strategy towards what the data is indicating to work and go from there. And if they don’t convert, don’t worry. Not all was lost.
Through installing various company’s pixel software (essentially software that can tell if someone on Facebook or Instagram previously visited your site) on your website, you can retarget them across the internet and convert them at a later date. This is called re-marketing; and you could use it to target users on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or the Google Display Network with tailored ads. And re-marketing works. In general, a re-marketed display ad converts 10x higher than a regularly targeted display ad.
Wrapping Up
Your business website is the foundation for your entire brand's online presence. It is the number one thing you need to get right before you can even start to think of other marketing activities. Your audience expects a clean, easy to use and well-designed website. They also expect your website to have great content on it that describes your services and provides helpful information to them.
Doing this is the foundation of any effective SEO and digital marketing strategy. And since the entire customer journey takes place almost entirely online these days, it's clear that the businesses that get this right will succeed and the ones that don’t will fail.
