7 Most Overlooked Website Tactics

Websites these days need to keep up with the evolving tech to remain relevant in this day and age. Most businesses struggle because they’re not evolving, don’t be one of them.

Smarter Websites for Smarter Businesses
Your business website needs to be more than a brochure for your business. It needs to be a virtual connecting place, where your prospective customers can easily contact. They must be able to make a decision right away whether they would like to use your services or not. If you want them to decide in your favor and convert them into a regular customer, you need to be smart about it. 

7 Ways to a Smarter Website
There are 7 components to a smart website. If you have them, you’ll be ahead of the curve and will start to reap its benefits, soon.

1. Add Analytics
First and foremost, you need to know who’s visiting your website, how they’re getting there, what they did once they got there, where they went after that etc. This data will help you shape your online strategy; because once you understand your visitor’s behavior you can make educated changes to improve results further. Harvard Business School wanted to expand the digital reach of two of its summer schools: Harvard Summer School and Harvard Extension School. With employing the right analytical tool they were able to create a streamlined SEO and PPC campaign that: increased their registration by 75% from organic searches; 89% increase in traffic from organic search.

2. Add Forms
Forms are a great way to encourage customers to connect with you and gather data. Businesses ask customers to sign-up for their newsletter or open a new account with a form, too. Just remember, the shortest most concise forms have the highest conversion rates. DropBox got 70,000 users overnight just because their sign-up webform was extremely simple.

3. Add Social Media
You may have a fairly strong following on social media, but are you leveraging it correctly to make your website more attractive in the eyes of the all-powerful search engines? If you want your brand to be visible and to stand out amongst the crowd, social media is the key. You can add/embed social media to your website through various ways, including: include social media buttons; showcase your Facebook and/or Twitter feeds on your website; include Share buttons. According to Shareaholic, social media is now the number one driver of all website referral traffic. Herschel Supply Co., a Vancouver based small business manufacturing high quality backpacks and travel apparel improved their customer satisfaction by 20% and improve overall brand image by 60% simply by being socially active on various social media outlets.  

4. Add Photos
People love pictures. They now expect and prefer an image-centric experience over a text-centric experience. Images give a website a more personal ‘feel’, which improves customer interaction and ultimately conversion. When done right, adding high resolution pictures can improve website conversion many times over. 37Signals improved sign-ups for their Highrise product by 102.5% by adding a picture of a person.

5. Add Chat
You went to buy a shoe. You saw a shoe you liked, but when you looked around to inquire about the price or available sizes – there was no salesperson to be found. What did you do? You probably waited a few minutes and then left. Consider the chat box on your website your salesperson. If you’re not there to answer your visitor’s queries – they’ll leave. Intuit improved conversion by 211% by implementing proactive chat on key areas on their website.

6. Add Responsive
These days smartphones account for 75% of all internet traffic. Which means, around 8 people in 10 are accessing your website through their smartphones. Therefore, launching a responsive version of your website is essential to the success and progress of your business. After launching a responsive version of their website, Offspring improved their mobile conversion rate by 15%, mobile revenue by 102.58% and organic traffic by 25.5%.

7. Add Content
If you want to be noticed by search engines, you need the right kind of content on your website. To stand out, you need to update the content on your website regularly through blogs, articles, case studies, white papers, info-graphics etc. Trensic Media improved its website traffic by a whopping 1,000% by their 5-week aggressive blogging strategy.

Stay Ahead of Your Competition with Smart Websites
In this customer-centric age, the best way to keep your customers satisfied is by connecting with them. Not only do smart websites help you automate your business, they’re your first point of introduction to prospective buyers as well – keeping you well ahead of your competitors.