Everybody knows that your company should have a website! In 2023 that is how most people learn and find out about your business. But, just having a website is not nearly enough. Nobody will find your website if you don’t know how to optimize and build a great website. If your website is confusing, and not user-friendly, people will click off immediately.
Okay so that is great, but how do you build a website that drives traffic? Today we are going to dive into 5 beginner tips that can help you start building your website right away to increase traffic to your business. These tips will be a bit more general- stay tuned for more articles that will go more in-depth about each of these tips!
Tip 1: Learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This will be our broadest tip. Search Engine Optimization is a huge field, and is growing exponentially every day. SEO is essentially how people find your sites. So, for example, if you are a brownie store in San Diego, you want your website to be the first link that pops up when someone searches “Brownies in San Diego”. SEO is how you get your website to the top of the results page.
When looking into how to optimize your website, it is extremely overwhelming to know where to begin. Therefore, our first tip is to simply learn about what search engine optimization means. We have collected a few websites that have great tools and information to help you out on this journey.
Please check out these pages!
Tip 2: Finding Keywords for Your Website
The next research tip is to find and understand your important keywords. If you don’t know what a keyword is for SEO, here is a simple definition: They are topics and ideas that define what your business/website is about. Returning to our brownies example, keywords would be: Brownie, baking, bakeries, sweets, and café. These are what we expect our customers to be Googling to find our website.
Finding and understanding your keywords is a great way to understand what you need to base your content on. If you know your keyword is “bakery” you want to ensure you have things about bakeries on your website! Keywords are also excellent topics to write blog articles about. Use Google’s keyword planner to help you with this task.
Tip 3: Mobile Vs. Desktop Users
Do you think more people are searching for your site on their phone, or on a desktop? If you said mobile device, you’d be correct! There is usually a much higher percentage of users surfing the web via mobile devices rather than a desktop computer. So, even though people usually create their website with their desktop users in mind, you must ensure that your website is fully useable on mobile devices. Here is a great website to test how useable your site is on mobile!
Tip 4: Check Your Website Speed
Our next tip is a very important one: check your website speed! If your site is too slow, people will log off.
Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5).
(Portent, 2019)
Luckily it is not too difficult to check your site speed and find out what needs to be improved. There are tools that will help you determine your site speed and will show you exactly how to fix it. Visit page speed insights to view your whole report for mobile and desktop sites.
Tip 5: Test your Website
Our last quick tip for our blog today is about user testing our website. Like with speed, if a website is too confusing people will not want to stay long and may get frustrated quickly. You want to make sure when building out your website that it makes sense to anyone who visits. The menu items should be clear, easy to find, and easy to navigate. If you aren’t sure that your website is user-friendly, ask a friend or colleague for help. Create several questions and goals, and have them work through the website. They can find mistakes and pain points that you may have missed!
Thank you for taking the time to read about our beginner SEO tips. Many of these tips are quick, and can be done today! If you are having trouble setting up your website, please reach out to us.
We offer many other solutions at Senior Care Business Advisors. We are also launching new solutions in the coming months. Currently, we have availability in our Coaching Program for new clients. As always, we offer a Free consultation call to determine the needs of your business and how we can help you achieve your goals for 2023. Reach out to me at twest@seniorcareba.com or give me a call at 678-340-3649. We look forward to working with you!