3 ways to make your website a success

Making your website work for your audience is something you need to think about before you start building your website. Setting up a website properly from the beginning is a lot easier than trying to fix an old website.

A tough decision a lot of website owners have to make is whether to start a fresh with a new website or try to fix the old one. Either way every website needs to have the following to have any chance of being a success in the online world:

A solid foundation

Like a house, a website needs a solid foundation before you start building on it. If it doesn’t have a good foundation it won’t work for you or your users.

Start with a solid foundation. First your homepage domain needs to be as simple as possible without additional code after the URL. If the URL structuring isn’t consistent and clear then it may be better and cheaper to start a fresh with a new website.

The layout of the website should be easy to navigate. Google need to be able to crawl your website easily otherwise it will cause problems with your rankings from the beginning. Google also ranks a website on how user-friendly it is so if your users can’t navigate your website quickly and efficiently you won’t rank well.

Create content that is unique and searchable

When you build a website you need to make sure that every title, description and all other tags are relevant and purposeful. You need to put yourself in your customer’s shoes thinking about what they will search for and what information they will require once they land on your website. 

Keep readers on your website for as long as possible

Once you have fulfilled the first two steps, you should now focus on keeping those readers on your website for as long as possible.

Review your Google analytics to see how much time people are actually spending on your website. If you have a high bounce rate (something over 40%) than you may need to find another way of keeping people on your website. A high bounce rate could simply be down to users not being able to find what they want straight away or that your website is outdated in design and not user-friendly.

A clear call-to-action is crucial for any website to guide the user through the site to important pages. Without them users may not be able to find what they are looking for fast enough making them back up and move onto one of your competitor’s websites. 

Google also monitors this, so if you can keep someone on your website Google will see it as your website is user-friendly and rank you higher because of it. 

By completing these three tasks your website will function properly and you will see the benefits because of it.