Features Of A 'Good' Business Website
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This is a talk presented by Dhawal Shah, Technical Director at 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency, at Startup & SME Academy on 19th Jan 2017 on the topic of 'Features Of a Good Business Website'. He discusses WHAT makes a website good from a business perspective, and then discusses the features needed to achieve these business goals.
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Features Of A 'Good' Business Website
- 1. Engage Asia. Go Digital.
- 2. Features Of A ‘Good’ Business Website Dhawal Shah Technical Director 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency
- 3. `` ` About Me • First program at 8 • First website at 13 • Studied at NUS & Stanford • Worked in Silicon Valley at Qik • Worked at DSTA • Co-founded Hucklebury, 2Stallions, & Little India Directory 1
- 4. I did a search on Google 2
- 5. Features Of A ‘Good’ Business Website ‘Well Branded’ ‘Lead Generating’ ‘Revenue Generating’ That Attracts Targeted Visitors To Help Fulfill My Business Objectives What is ‘Good’? 3
- 6. • I already gave you the answer two slides ago.. • Your website needs to be FOUND online on Google.. Desktop (Worldwide) Mobile + Tablet (Worldwide) Graphs from NetMarketShare from Jan 2016 to Dec 2016 How To Attract Targeted Traffic? 4
- 7. STEPS PURPOSE Make sure every page on your website has a title & meta description that is descriptive ( http://bit.ly/SSMEMetaTag ) To control how your search results look like on Google. Create a sitemap.xml file ( www.xml-sitemaps.com ) To tell Google which pages you want to show in their search results. Set up a robots.txt file for your website ( http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/ ) To give permission to Google to index your website. Create an account on Google Webmaster Tools ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools ) To inform Google that your website exists. Submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools To speed up how quickly Google indexes your website pages. How To Get Found 5
- 8. When you search for your brand name: Results 6 e.g. ‘2Stallions’
- 9. 1. Keep Visitors On Your Website Load Your Site Quickly! How To Fulfill My Business Objectives? 7
- 10. Profitable Startup, In Business For 5 Years Before (24th Mar ’16) Result 1. 80% improvement in people NOT leaving the site immediately via gtmetrix.com After (12th Jan ‘17) The Case For Speed 8 2. 68% improvement in how much of the site is browsed
- 11. STEPS PURPOSE Use smaller image sizes ( http://compressjpeg.com/ ) Smaller file size loads faster. Enable Gzip compression for your website ( https://gtmetrix.com/enable-gzip- compression.html ) Compressing reduces the overall size of your website, allowing it to download faster. Leverage browser caching ( https://gtmetrix.com/leverage- browser-caching.html ) Allows static website content to be stored with the end user to improve future loading times. How To Improve Your Speed 9
- 12. 1. Keep Visitors On Your Website - Load Your Site Quickly! Gain Their Trust! How to Fulfill My Business Objectives? 10
- 13. Have a well-designed website Modern Responsive (Mobile-friendly) Display Awards & Testimonials How to Gain Trust? 11
- 14. Before 12
- 15. After 13
- 16. 1. Keep Visitors On Your Website - Load Your Site Quickly! - Gain Their Trust! Be A Thought Leader! How to Fulfill My Business Objectives? 14
- 17. • Start a blog for your website to provide useful articles about your industry that visitors may be looking for • How It Helps – More information on your website = more keywords you can be found for, therefore, more traffic – Visitors stay longer on your site to read your content. This builds more trust – Good information is shared, further enhancing your company’s reputation and reach Read our article for the full 21 reasons you should be blogging: http://2stallions.com/21-reasons- your-business-should-start-blogging How To Be A Thought Leader? 15
- 18. Data from semrush.com artofstyle.club Case For Thought Leadership 16
- 19. 1. Keep Visitors On Your Website - Load Your Site Quickly! - Gain Their Trust! - Be A Thought Leader! 2. Convert Visitors To Leads & Revenue How to Fulfill My Business Objectives? 17
- 20. • Contact Points • Live Chat (especially for eCommerce) • Newsletter Sign Up How To Convert Visitors To Leads On Your Website? 18
- 21. Give visitors as many chances as possible to get in touch. Contact Points 19
- 22. Live Chat 20
- 23. Can be anywhere on your site. E.g. 2Stallions has one form in the footer and an offer for a ‘FREE WEB ANALYSIS’ that follows you on every page on the right side. Newsletter Sign Up 21
- 24. Email stats 2016 from SmartInsights.com Why Email Marketing? 22
- 25. • Attracts Targeted Visitors - Good On-Site Search Engine Optimization • Achieves Business Objectives - Keeping Visitors On Your Site • Load Your Site Quickly • Gain Their Trust • Be A Thought Leader - Converting Visitors To Leads & Revenue • Contact Points • Live Chat • Newsletter Sign Up A ‘Good’ Business Website Summary 22
- 26. Questions? Thank you for listening. 23
- 27. Access To Slides Online 24
Editor's Notes
- Cover page
- Introduction
- White background (logo 2stallions changed to be gray)
- 4700 shares on Mashable Asia & 4900 shares on Entrepreneur.com so it seems business owners are REALLY interested in knowing this information – which I assume is also the reason why I’m standing here in front of you and you’re giving me your full attention, I hope.
- Immediately after I proposed this topic, I thought, oh my god, I’ve made a mistake. After all, ‘good’ is such a generic term. How do I even begin to define it? I am sure everyone here wants a ‘Good’ website. But it begs the question - what IS a ‘good’ website? What does it mean to an entrepreneur and a business to have a ‘good’ website? Here’s a familiar phrase I hear from clients when describing their definition of ‘Good’. Almost all businesses want their company branding and culture to shine through their website and impress their visitors. After all, Apple has taught all of us the wonders of good design. Everyone wants visitors to come to their website and go away with a feeling of the type of company they’re interacting with – whether it’s quirky, professional, casual, up-scale, friendly. Maybe you guys have other answers for what ‘Good’ means to you from a business perspective? *get answers* A well-branded website is definitely important but that’s not really a business objective is it? Many clients, when we probe them deeper, want a website that helps them generate leads for their business. What it boils down to though, is that most companies are looking for a website that makes them money, unless you’re a not-for-profit. However, for your website to generate a profit for you, the features and information needs to be made to attract your ideal customer persona, as martin shared earlier, because after all, Customer is King. And you must define the features your website needs for your visitors to help you fulfill your business objective. Since you’ve built your website for a specific audience and target customer that is INTERESTED IN WHAT YOU HAVE TO OFFER, you need to be able to get these specific visitors to your website? So finally, I realized my talk’s title should be…
- So let’s start with the first part of that – attracting targeted traffic to your website. You can have the world’s most beautiful website but if you’re not showing up on Google (or Bing), your competitor’s butt-ugly website WILL generate more revenue than yours! If you look at the market shares of search engines, you can see that Google is heads and shoulders above the competition, so if you concentrate your efforts on showing up there, I don’t blame you. If you’re wondering HOW your website can help you to attract traffic, the answer lies in On-Site Search Engine Optimisation.
- This part may be a little technical, so to make it easy, I’ve provided links to relevant online content that teaches you more about it. Most of these steps outlined are done ON your website. From your website, you can control how your search results look like on Google through something called the title & meta description. Then you need to create a file called a sitemap to inform Google which pages to show on search results and a second one called robots.txt to give permission to Google to go through your files and index it for their search results. You could stop here if you wanted to because this would work just fine. However, if you wanted to speed things up, and wanted a little more control over how your website shows up on Google, you should set up an account on Webmaster tools and then submit the sitemap you created earlier to Google.
- Of course, you may not show up in search results overnight. But following these steps will help your website get indexed on Google, and potential leads can find you by searching for the products you offer and if they know your brand. For example, our 2Stallions website now ranks on the first page of Google Singapore for the keyword ‘sem agency’ without having paid anything or doing anything else beyond the steps I mentioned in the last slide. And this is a keyword which drives targeted traffic of people looking for search engine marketing services to our website and generates leads for us. If you follow these steps, your website is finally on par with your competition and it’s time to look at the second half of the statement I made.
- According to statistics, 47% of consumers expect a webpage to load in under 2 seconds and 40% abandon a website that loads in over 3 seconds. A fast loading website also shows up higher in Google search results. I’m sure you’re thinking that most of these stats are bullshit, and that people have more patience. This is why we created a case study for you. http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/your-website-design-should-load-in-4-seconds/
- Since we’re in the business of building websites and helping clients with theirs, I wanted to share a case study of a startup client that has been in business for 5 years and is profitable. We helped to improve their page load time by over 50%. You can check your own website’s speed via gtmetrix.com. It’s an excellent aggregation site that gives you data from multiple sources and breaks down the improvements you can make to better your site speeds. What was phenomenal for this particular client though, was the IMPACT of this change. We compared results for the period from 1st Apr 2016 until 11th Jan 2017 to the comparable period from 20th Jun 2015 to 31st Mar 2016. And there has been a MASSIVE improvement in visitors NOT leaving their website immediately by 80%. That is HUGE. At the same time, visitors are browsing their website MUCH MORE on average. They go through 5 pages compared to 3 pages before this change. While we cannot share the impact that this has on their revenue, it’s clear to see the impact the speed improvement has had on being able to keep their visitors on their site. So if you wanted to achieve similar speed improvements for your own website, what can you do?
- Again, some technical things you can do for your website today. Honestly, I suggest you go to gtmetrix.com, run your website through their analysis and read the information they have to share on each topic. While I’m only sharing 3 items here, which will make a noticeable difference to your page loading time, there are MANY more things you can optimize on your website. First thing, start compressing the images on your website. You can probably reduce the file size of every single image on your website significantly without your visitors being able to tell the difference. So don’t hesitate to do that – there are even free online tools that help you. After compressing your images, make sure your website is also compressed. Every time you go to a new website, it gets downloaded to your browser from a server. By enabling Gzip compression, it reduces the file size of your entire website, making it faster. Finally, leverage browser caching. The chances are that your images and a lot of your files that make up your website are not going to change much over time, so let them be stored on the visitor’s computer so that the next time they come back to your website, they can immediately view the site rather than having to download everything from your server again.
- It doesn’t matter how fast your website loads. If your visitors are unable to peg you as a reputable business, they WILL be leaving your website pretty quickly. So then, how can your fast loading website gain the trust of your visitors?
- Your website can gain immediate trust by being modern. What this means is that it shouldn’t look like a 90s website with flashing banners, music playing and 10 different fonts on the same page. It should follow current trends for design, like good use of white space and typography for example. This immediately shows visitors that your business is up to date and the care for your website also reflects well on your business. A responsive or mobile-friendly website also tells visitors that your business is current and abreast with latest trends, and in fact, these days, a modern and mobile friendly website are the bare minimum expectations from visitors. You can gain further credibility by blowing your own trumpet on your website. While modesty is great, if a visitor is coming to your website for the first time, sharing your accolades and testimonials from other clients with them puts them at ease and helps gain their trust.
- Their new website is mobile responsive, well-branded, makes it clear for visitors to take an action and has generated many more leads for them since it went live.
- This client is one of the top Indian maid agencies in Singapore – Charisha. Their previous website looked like this and generated very few leads for them. The comments they received from clients were ‘dated’, ‘too many words’, ‘I need to zoom in on my phone to see anything’
- How else can you gain the trust of your visitors and to position yourself as the most trustworthy source of information for their needs?
- These are just 3 reasons. We actually came up with 21 reasons, s
- We bootstrapped Hucklebury, an online dress shirts business, back in 2013, and our biggest problem was figuring out how to drive traffic to our website to generate sales from our eCommerce site. The single best decision we made was to start a blog and publish, without fail, once a week, on fashion. The organic traffic grew slowly but the blog became our biggest source of sales within a year. Today, we have stopped selling dress shirts online but the blog still exists as a rebranded content platform – ArtOfStyle.club - and gets over 30,000 unique visitors each month. It ranks for over 14,000 keywords and almost 400 of them are in the top 3 positions on Google. If I were to pay Google for the same amount of traffic, it would cost me $5,700 per month. That is the power of having a blog and writing content your visitors want to read consistently.
- So now we’ve shown you how you can keep visitors ON your site… what else can you do on your website to help you fulfill your objectives? For an eCommerce website, the ROI is clear – you want sales coming thick and fast online. For businesses in the service industry, like us, we depend on lead generation and then closing them for more sales and generating revenue.
- Slightly cheating with
- You should make it as easy as possible for visitors to get in touch with you. For example, can you count the number of contact points for The Harley Street Clinic there are? I counted 11. And that’s pretty much upon loading. Their phone numbers, locations and their book appointment buttons are great ways to ensure visitors can immediately get in touch and their book teleconsult is good for overseas patients. The slider on the left keeps rotating and 2 of the 3 sliders are information about their services. We suggest at least having a link to a contact form in your top navigation, and if you have multiple locations, listing at least one number at the top of the page.
- According to statistics from the company, LiveChat, you can experience between 10%-30% increase in conversion rates with a live chat feature on your website if your website has reasonable traffic.
- There are other ways as well – popups that show up on top of the site, or as we do it on 2Stallions, we have a newsletter sign up in the footer and we also offer a tantalising offer for visitors with a FREE WEB ANALYSIS. An offer definitely helps to improve conversions of visitors to leads. But what’s the purpose of collecting the name and email addresses of people through your website? Well, not everyone who shows up on your website is ready to buy from you straight away but you’ve impressed them enough or offered them something that they want for free, and they’re willing to give you their name and email address. From here, you need to nurture the lead by sending them newsletters and doing email marketing or marketing automation. At some point, they may suddenly realize they need the services you offer, and because you’ve been keeping in touch – you’re the first company they’ll think of (hopefully).
- Email has statistically been shown to be the cheapest way to reach your audience and the one with the highest return on investment, meaning more people turn into customers over a period of time. Here are some statistics from 2016 for open rates of emails being sent and the click through rates, meaning the reader clicked on a link within the email you sent. A high click to open ration shows that the audience is much more engaged.