5 Most important things for a website: essential tips

Building a website can be a tricky task.

It’s even more challenging to get it to do what you want it to do (i.e., make more sales). 

Data suggest that the average web page conversion rate across industries is only 2.35% to 5.31%. And for B2B, it is even lower, ranging from 2.23% to 4.31%. 

Fortunately, you don’t have to put up with being average.

Below, we discuss the five most important things for a website to supercharge your online impact, bring you closer to your objectives, appeal to your target audience, and sell more services. 

Let’s take a look…

The 5 most important things for your website

1. Define your purpose clearly

The first step should be to define your website’s purpose clearly. You need to make sure you know what it’s for.

Knowing what you want to achieve with your website will make many of the subsequent decisions much easier.

It will also give you a much better chance of success compared to if you’re unclear or trying to do too many things.

The key thing to remember is that, as with all marketing, it’s about your customers, not you.

Many professional services companies believe the purpose of their website is to tell customers about who they are, what they do and their expertise. 

But this gets the cart before the horse.

Most people searching for your services (including B2B) want solutions, not showboating. 

Therefore, the purpose of your website should be threefold: 

1. To describe a problem your customers are facing
2. To highlight pain points associated with existing solutions
3. To overcome concerns and demonstrate results

For example, suppose your professional service company offers IT consulting. Your website might: 

1. Describe how hard it is for businesses to manage networks in-house
2. Discuss how existing consultancy solutions don’t solve problems
3. Talk about how your consulting firm goes into the business and resolves issues on the ground (instead of standing back and giving instructions from afar, as most professional service firms do)

Pitches like these, arranged clearly on websites and landing pages can help improve the low conversion rates mentioned in the introduction. 

2. Focus on user experience

Next, you want to focus on the user experience. Consider what people visiting your site truly want. 

Most consulting firms provide research papers, information about their services, and an “about us” page discussing credentials. 

All this stuff is important, but it’s not essential. 

Yes, you want to describe what you do and why you have authority, but not at the expense of understanding what users want. 

So, what should you do instead? 

The first step is to get the basics right. You want to dominate technical SEO, ensuring your pages load rapidly and use all the correct mark-up and settings to help search engines index your website. 

You also want to make the website engaging.

Professional service firms should be anything but bland and dry. After all, you’re right at the frontier of your industry, solving problems nobody else is addressing. 

Lastly, your website should be straightforward to navigate.

Users should feel like you are holding their hand, showing them what to do next.

Once you have these elements in place, then you can start to thing about the fancier things you want to try. But even then you’ll probably find that simpler is better.

3. High-quality content focused on helping your customers and selling your services

Building high-quality content focused on helping your customers is an essential part of building a successful website.

It’s no good to have a flashy website that doesn’t meet the needs of your customers and leaves them wondering how your service can help them.

The starting point for high-quality content is to understand your audience’s needs and behaviours, and the intent behind why they’re on your website. Can you see theme here?! :)

Once you know this you can provide much more value and better position yourself as the solution to their needs.

Once you have your content and messaging sorted, it’s important to think about how it’s displayed.

High-performance pages avoid long paragraphs of text and use the simplest terms to get your message across. 

For example, if you sell business strategy services, you want your sales content to address your potential customers’ concerns, queries, and behaviours.

Doing this is more likely to generate interest than discussing your VP or team skills.

It’s also important to back up any statements you make about how you can help people. Tangible, concrete numbers add credibility to your message. 

Here are some examples of how you could use stats to sell:

• Reduce network downtime by 90%
• Improve marketing ROI by 50%
• Enable firms to capture 20% more leads and make 30% more sales from social media ads

Whatever your data shows, put the benefits front and centre.

Then, use numbers to support your claim, providing verifiable links to previous clients so prospects can perform due diligence. 

4. Optimise for all devices

Optimising your content for all devices is another essential tip. Prospects should be able to access your website with any device without impediment. 

Websites need to optimise for: 

• Desktop
• Mobile

Desktop comprises only 38.9% of all internet use while tablets and smartphones account for over 61.1%. Therefore, the latter is more important than the former. 

Responsive designs are the gold standard for mobile device optimisation. Websites should fit any screen size.

To help this, use suitable tools. Don’t write long chunks of text without sufficient white space. Break up sentences and paragraphs into bite-sized nuggets that people on mobile devices can consume more easily. 

Also, ensure your images scale and shift as device screen resolutions change. Photos shouldn’t look distorted or too large for the viewing window. 

Lastly, websites should have mobile-friendly calls-to-action (CTAs). These should be buttons users can click with their thumbs to “learn more” or “download” items they need, like whitepapers. 

5. Ensure fast loading times

Our final essential website tip is to ensure fast loading times. 

Google wants websites to load in two seconds or less based on surveys of user attention spans. If site visitors wait longer than this, they become more likely to click back to search results (according to research).  

Of course, most websites aren’t this fast. The majority take between 2.5 and 8.6 seconds to load. Therefore, you probably need to take action to improve yours.  

Boosting website speed involves various technical activities, including: 

• Minification of unnecessary code (expressed in CSS, HTML, and JavaScript), enabling faster page parsing
• The use of content delivery networks (CDNs) to feed website visitors chunks of page information from multiple servers proximate to their location (instead of just one)
• Reducing the number of HTTP requests required to retrieve files from website services
• The use of proper image formatting and compression (such as PNG and JPEG) (we like EWWW Image Optimizer)
• Improvements in hosting plans for greater bandwidth (to cope with sites attracting more visitors)

Therefore, you might want to hire an SEO company to do it for you. 

In summary

So, what does your website need?

As discussed, first and foremost, a quality website must serve users.

To do this it needs to have a clearly defined purpose based on matching your services with the wants and needs of your target clients.

Then, it should pave a clear path forward and offer solutions.

High-quality content, fast load times, and a design that works across all devices should support this clear purpose.

Visitors should feel “delighted” (to pinch jargon from Google’s terminology) and want to purchase your professional services.