Your website is the heart of your brand, the focal point of your online presence. It is the first platform that the majority of your target audience will access when they attempt to find out more about your business via the web, which is why it is absolutely essential that it makes a great first impression. The feeling that it arouses, the information that it provides, and the image it provides of your business will make or break your ability to convert customers, which is why you must make an effort to optimize it.
If you want to generate leads and ultimately convert customers via the web, you need to ensure that your website is making a great first impression. To find out how that can be achieved, be sure to read on.
Optimize your homepage
Your homepage is the first thing that visitors will see whenever they access your site, which is why it must be optimized at all costs. It provides your audience with their first taste of what they can expect from website, and even your business as a whole, which is why your attempt to improve your site’s first impression must start here.
Put the following advice into practice, and your site’s homepage will be optimized in no time:
– Make sure this page shares your overarching mission, values, and goals
– Use this page to communicate to your audience the fact that your business has the capacity to address their wants and needs
– Ensure that this page caters to each individual buyer persona that you target
– Aim to get users beyond this page by filling it with calls-to-action
– The content posted on your homepage is, for all intents and purposes, your business value proposition — for this reason, you must make sure that this content is as engaging, intuitive and targeted as it can be
– Use different forms of content (written, image, video, infographic, audio, etc.)
– That being said, you should also embrace whitespace so as to ensure that you don’t overwhelm your audience with content
– Ensure there are no problems with the menu/navigation buttons
– Create a header that instantly draws attention
– Make sure that the page is SEO friendly and quick to load
Ensure 24/7 uptime
Downtime is something that you have to avoid at all costs. Not only will it stop your site from being able to make a great first impression, but it’ll actually result in it making a bad one. Inactivity will tarnish your brand image, it’ll lead to customer dissatisfaction, and it will push visitors away before they even have the chance to see all of the great content that is posted on your site. It is for this reason why you must go out of your way to ensure 24/7 uptime.
Of course, you can’t keep an eye on the accessibility of your website at all points in the day — you might be a business owner, but you still need to sleep! Fortunately, there are companies out there that now offer an expert website monitoring service, one of which being Cloudprobes. They have the tools and know-how required to monitor both your site and your API endpoints at all times; should they ever uncover any problems with regard to the availability of your site, their advanced notification system will alert you to the issue right away. What you then do with this information is entirely up to you — if you want to deal with the accessibility issue before it increases your bounce rate and damages your brand, you need to take action quickly. The sooner you act in this sense, the more likely you will be to get your site up and running again before anybody else seeks to access it.
Put the focus on customer service
Your audience members aren’t going to be impressed if you make your site all about you. They’ll deem you self-absorbed, and that is definitely not the ideal impression that you want to be portrayed of your business.
Instead of using your site as a platform to talk about how great your products and services are, put the focus on customer service. Fill your site, especially your homepage, with information about what it is you can do to help your consumers. In short: make your customers the focal point of your site, offer them solutions, and optimize their user experience.
If you put all of the above advice into practice, your website will start making a great first impression on its visitors in no time.
