Its no fluke that certain websites receive large amounts of traffic. All website owners are able to attract large quantities of traffic by implement certain methods, but how many website owners make the effort?
Here are 10 tips to engage your audience and attract regular website visitors:
Speed
In general people are impatient. Don’t make them wait for your pages to load. Users expect websites to load instantly. Google sets the bar on speed, since they are able to almost instantly re-arrange thousands of web pages and order them according to a users search query. Google is also monitoring how fast web pages load, guess what, this is also affecting your ranking, so check your page load speed today.
Your web designer should be able to make several changes that will ensure that your website loads quickly every time!Â
Concise Messages
Much like page-loading speeds. People want the information they were looking for instantly – so get to the point!
I’m not saying that your web pages should contain small quantities of content, far from it. But there is a big difference between stuffing paragraphs with words and writing concise, punchy content.
Navigation
All website users expect good website navigation. The days of difficult to use websites are nearly over. It’s vital that you check the usability of your website. If your website is difficult for to use, people will leave.
A good menu structure and internal linking can help users navigate around your site.
Image Optimisation
Most good-looking websites contain professional images that are very large in size. Big images take time to download and slowdown your websites loading time. Users are impatient and unwilling to wait for images to load. Ask your web designer to optimise your images. This will ensure that your images load quickly without compromising quality.
Colour Pallets
The colour scheme within a website is often overlooked. All quality web designers understand the importance of branding and consistency. Your website should follow the same qualities implemented within your other marketing materials. Fonts, Colours, Logos and Images are all influential factors that need to be carefully selected to represent your business and convey your message.
There is an abundance of web pages online following a ‘blue’ colour scheme. There is no doubt that blue is a good colour to use since people are receptive to blue as a calm and trust worthy colour. Whilst blue is a great colour to use, there are so many websites using this within their colour scheme that your brand can get lost in the crowd.
Alternate colour schemes that are working well include; Green with Grey. The all time classic Black with White is also proving to be an effective combination.
Cater For A Global Audience
Websites are accessible from almost all corners of the world, but how receptive is your website to the global audience. It astonishes me how many businesses could sell their services or products across multiple nations. For instance we are a web design company based in Colchester and we have worked with businesses from all corners of the world including the; UK, USA, Italy and Brazil.
But how many businesses are designing their websites to cater for such a broad spectrum of people? Translation, currency conversion and measurements are all key areas that all businesses working with a global audience should consider incorporating within their websites.
Spelling & Grammar
Check your spelling and grammar! Many people will not tolerate spelling or grammatical mistakes. I can’t say that this is my best area of expertise, however I do my best to ensure that the content I publish is of a high standard. I always read through my content multiple times before publishing.
It may not seem important, but people do look for quality and if your content is not up to scratch it’s likely that they won’t contact you.
A Journey To Nowhere
Everyone hates a visit to the 404 page. Many website owners are guilty of not checking their link profiles and it is a costly mistake to make. I advise all website owners to go through their websites and check that all links are active. Broken links are typical signs of a deserted website. Users hate being sent to a 404 page, Google also knows this and these careless mistakes will affect your rankings!
Give Users Direction
At some point, most people have probably clicked a link and landed on a page that they were not expecting to go to. This will irritate users and Google will track the bounce back rates. Make certain that you clearly explain within the anchor text what page users will land on if they click the link. For instance, the anchor text; Web Design Portfolio should link to a page that contains a web design portfolio or information about a portfolio page since this is what users will expect to land on.
It’s unfortunate that I come across so many websites that include links to irrelevant pages. Remember to always use anchor text that is relevant to the landing page.
Clear Contact
Many website owners seem to have a misconception as to what their website is designed to do. For most people their website is needed to generate leads or sales. To receive leads in particular it’s vital that users are able to contact you. For instance if someone were to search for the term; Video Production Colchester, it’s more than likely that person is looking to enquire about video production services – so make it easy for them to contact you.
In most instances, as long as you make it clear where your contact page is, people will be able to contact you. Going one step further, you should offer more than one means for people to contact you. The best contact options include; contact forms, email addresses and telephone numbers. A lot of the time customers feel uncomfortable calling someone they don’t know, you will see a swift increase in enquiries once they can email you.
Â
Have a look at our other services: SEO vs. conversion rates, more about our founder, web design principals, video optimisation, how to choose web design company, how to choose keywords, how to sell through video and 5 great online marketing tools!
Â