Does Your Website Reflect on How You Care About Your Business?

Your company website is the face of your business. It is the first impression you make to visitors and potential customers. However, many businesses often neglect their company website, which can be damaging for business.

A company website reflects the company’s attitude towards its business and customers. You want to ensure that your company website gives an accurate representation of your business. More importantly, if you want your company to reach the top of your industry, your company website must reflect it.

Today, we will go over some important aspects of your company website to help it reflect how you care about your business, its online visitors, and its customers.

But first, let’s look at the importance of a good website for your business.

The Importance of a Good Website for Business

Here are just a few things that make a good website important for any business, whether large or small.

  • Your Website Reflects Your Business and Professionalism

An attractive, professional-looking website tells your visitors and potential customers that your business is professional as well. Whereas a poorly designed, unattractive, and unprofessional website will reflect those exact things about your business.

This is perhaps the biggest reason why a good website is important. It can build trust and increase your revenue through conversions and sales. If this means getting a professional web designer to build a good website for you, you should go for it.

  • Market Share

Whether you are an industry giant, have a brick-and-mortar store, or are running a bootstrap business from your mom’s garage, having a good website can mean extra business. Your customers are looking for you online and they should not have trouble finding you.

This means having a functioning website that delivers to their needs. Your website can encourage them to make purchases or go to your physical store. However, if they find competitors instead because they have a website and it looks better than yours, you will lose business.

Your market share suffers without a good website and there is no way around this.

  • Global Reach and Brand Awareness

A company website can give your business a global reach. While you may not cater to international audiences, a website can make it possible for you to expand on a global scale. Your website is the online home of your business and it means becoming instantly global.

The internet has no real borders and people can reach you from all corners of the world through your website. Whether you choose to market and service international audiences to expand your business is your decision, but with a functional website, you have the option.

It also means that your brand can get recognized from anywhere. You can potentially expose your brand and company to huge audiences across the globe. Your professional website will increase your online presence and brand awareness among billions of users of the internet.

Does Your Website Reflect on How You Care About Your Business?

You may not fully realize what aspects of your website are helping or not helping your business. Here are a few things that will help you better understand your website and improve it to reflect how you care about your business, online visitors to its website, and its customers.

Good Website Design

Good website design matters because it can attract visitors again and again, which is exactly what you want. It can help you gather leads and compel visitors to convert into customers. Whereas bad website design will hurt your business because it hurts your brand and marketing.

Since your website is a direct representation of your brand and business, you want to ensure a couple of things.

  • Your website can be easily found when someone searches for your brand online
  • Your website consistently represents your company, branding, and marketing
  • Your website branding instills trust in visitors
  • Your website is optimized to increase conversions
  • Your website is secure and private

Your company has a unique personality and you want to ensure that it is reflected on your company website. This is simply because consistent branding and a strong personality of your website help visitors develop loyalty and trust in your business.

Your customer community is built around your brand and it is what gives visitors a reason to support your business by buying your products and services.

On the other hand, having inconsistent branding and a weak personality on your website makes it look untrustworthy and does not compel visitors to visit again. They will have a hard time trusting your company and will likely never purchase your goods and services.

Develop Consistency

Your digital marketing has a big influence on your website traffic and branding. While some of your visitors will come to your website organically, most will come through your digital marketing efforts. This is why they must see consistency when they shift from your digital marketing to your website.

If things do not match, they may feel they are in the wrong place, or they may feel that they are being duped. Consistency of branding ensures that there is trust when prospects move from one media channel to another.

The overall mood, color palette, and fonts of your branding should be consistent across the board, from marketing to website. Branding is at the core of all marketing and when it is consistent, it meets visitor expectations, increasing their confidence in your brand and company.

Developing more trust increases the chances of converting visitors into customers. Hence, you need to consider and establish a well-thought-out brand for your business before you do anything else.

What is your company’s message, logo, and vision? What are its colors and fonts? What type of mood will it instill in customers? How is it unique and different from other brands and competitors? These are just a few branding questions that you need to answer before you develop your brand and personality.

Once you have developed your branding, you can then start your marketing accordingly to create a customer community around it through consistency and trust. Matching your website to your branding and marketing will reflect how you care about your business, its branding, and public image.

Use Concise Messaging

Time is precious for everyone and no one wants to spend theirs on long-form marketing messages. Websites are not like articles or blogs and your website should express the value of your business using clear and concise text, along with some attractive and powerful imagery.

When a visitor lands on your company website, they should be able to easily and identify your branding, vision, values, and intent. Most people will spend around 15 seconds on a website before they decide whether they should stay or move to a competitor.

Having confusing or long messaging on your website tells visitors that your company does not value their time. You must ensure that your website messaging and content reflect your true values and do not require visitors to waste their time.

Concise and accurate messaging on your website will reduce bounce rates and improve your company’s image and perception.

Improve User Interface (UI) and Website Functionality

A good website design is beautiful and functional as well. Your website’s user interface (UI) should be good-looking, easy to navigate for visitors, and functional. Good, functional UI helps visitors easily go through your website, consume content, and have a seamless user experience (UX).

A good website UI results in a good UX, which will help you get more repeat visitors and business. One thing that helps improve website UI and functionality is testing. Try different website layouts, navigation routes, content allocation, CTA (call to action) placements, and links before you decide on one that works well.

These factors affect how users perceive your business, consume your content, navigate your website, and whether or not they decide to buy your products and services. Poor page layout or website functionality, for example, are some of the biggest visitor deterrents for any website.

Whereas bad content will not build trust or compel visitors to make purchases. Even minor faults with your UI or website functionality can damage the UX of your entire company website. Your website navigation should be clear and concise.

Users should have no trouble moving in and out of its pages. Users expect a seamless UX and if you do not deliver, they will quickly move to a competitor. User attention spans are decreasing and smooth and functional website navigation allows quick access and solutions to their demands.

This is why a good UI and functional website show people how much you care about your business and the experience of its website’s visitors.

Ensure Mobile-Friendliness

A whopping 48 percent of users say that if a company website isn’t mobile-friendly, it is an indication of the business not caring. This means that if you want your company website to reflect how you care about your business, it needs to be mobile-friendly.

Your UI must be optimized for mobile devices to meet modern demands. The majority of your visitors and customers will use their mobile devices to access your website and therefore you need to deliver a responsive, mobile-friendly UX.

This means that any additions or changes you make to your website design or content must also meet its mobile demands. If you are not doing this regularly, you will lose a large share of your visitors, customers, and their trust in your brand.

These are all the things that matter to make your business a success because not having a mobile-friendly website quickly results in a loss of online sales. An easy way to test your website’s mobile-friendliness is to use the Google Mobile-Friendly Tool.

However, you must ensure that your website theme is updated and mobile-friendly before making use of this testing tool.

Increase Website Speed

As mentioned, attention spans are decreasing, which means the speed of your website matters a lot. Websites that load slowly can hurt how well your business performs online. Fast loading times are crucial in the competitive online environment.

As a rule of thumb, load times under 3 seconds are best. Every second longer your company website takes to load increases your visitor bounce rates. Your website’s slow loading speed will also hurt its ranking on the results page of big search engines like Google.

Here are just a few ways to increase your company websites' load speeds.

Perhaps the biggest factor in website speed is your web hosting. While budget web hosting services are attractive, for a growing business, these are not the best option because you will quickly outgrow what they offer.

It is always better to opt for a trusted web hosting service that is fast, secure, and reliable. They may be more expensive but they are worth considering if your website has a lot of traffic and cannot load quickly or efficiently with its current host.

That being said, it is not easy to move hosts. Some web hosting services offer easy, and often free, migration for other hosts, while others require extensive efforts. Consult your current and future web hosting service for a smooth migration.

  • Cashing Software

A caching plugin or software can enhance your website speed. There are plenty of free ones like W3 Total Cache, WP Supercache, SG Cache, and more. You can try a few before you decide which one is best for you. Just make sure to run one caching software at a time.

  • Images

All attractive websites use high-quality images and they are a huge factor in loading speeds. This is why you must compress your images before you upload them onto your website. There is plenty of free and easy-to-use software available online for you to do this.

If you have already uploaded uncompressed images onto your website, there are plugins and software available to optimize and compress them in bulk as well. Compressing high-quality images on your company website will result in a noticeable increase in its load times.

  • Update Frequently

A dynamic website with fresh content is the main reason visitors keep coming to your website again and again. You need to update your website and its content frequently. One way to do this is by updating text referring to past events in a future tense.

Using old content gives the impression that your website and company are slow, or worse, that it does not exist anymore. This can put a major dampen on the trust and loyalty of visitors and customers. Why would anyone invest their time in your business or website if it stays static?

This is why frequent content updates and design tweaks are important to keep users engaged and interested to visit your company website again and again.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a marketing strategy that helps increase your website’s rank on the search engine results page (SERP). This gives you more online visibility and an influx in web traffic to your business.

Imagine ranking number one in organic results of a search engine like Google. It will increase your traffic unlike anything else. Using good website design and SEO-friendly content, your company can increase its online visibility, presence, and traffic.

You will have a higher conversion rate and this will boost your business’ revenue. Good web design and structure are major factors that impact your company’s SEO efforts. However, SEO is always changing to meet user demands.

If you want your website to rank well on SERP, you need to constantly update your website accordingly. Not all changes in SEO are major changes, and usually, the larger aspects of your website can remain the same for years, whereas, you need to keep making minor tweaks to stay relevant to search engines.

Content is a big and fluid aspect that needs constant care as well. Things like keyword stuffing, link spamming, and other "black hat" methods do not work anymore and may result in a permanent or temporary ban.

Today, SEO is all about the user, and search engines like Google are tweaking SEO to meet user demands. You need to make sure that your website is updated to meet these demands. Whether it is content, website layout, high-quality links, mobile-friendliness, or load speeds, you want to deliver on all SEO fronts.

Not only will it increase your rank and traffic but it will improve your website to meet current user demands. This means your website will accurately reflect what users want and how you care about your business and its customers.

  • Get Online Reviews

Online reviews and testimonials on your website from existing customers can make a huge, positive impact on your audience’s perception of your business.

Most people trust reviews more than any marketing campaign. These days, everyone looks at an online review before they purchase anything. They can make a huge difference in your conversion rates and are especially important if a visitor has never heard of your product, service, or company before.

Your online reviews reflect how well your company operates and this shows people how you care about your business and its customers. No one wants to make poor purchase decisions and impartial reviews can help incentivize sales.

Whereas, a lack of online reviews can put off visitors and potential customers. It may push them to go to a competitor who has plenty of impartial reviews on their website and is not afraid to show how they care for their customers and business.

Getting customer reviews is not that difficult because most customers do not mind spending a few minutes sharing their experiences with others. You need to get as many as you can because it also helps you learn about what is good or bad about your business.

Conclusion

By now, you probably have a good idea of how your website reflects your business and how you can improve its perception among visitors and customers. To give you a small summary, here are the main mentioned things that help improve your brand’s image among audiences through your website.

website graphic

Of course, you must constantly find new ways to build trust and engage audiences through your company website as well. As you can imagine, all of these things are crucial for an attractive, professional website that reflects the true values of your business.

Missing out on anything may reflect poorly on your entire company website and result in a bad perception of your brand and business. Naturally, there are many more things that improve your website and its representation of your business but we can discuss them another time.

For now, you should consider the mentioned things and improve the key aspects of your website for a better brand image, improved customer perception, and increased revenue.

To learn more about how your website reflects how you care about your business and its customers, or if you need help with your website and digital marketing efforts, please visit our website today.

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