You want a business website that sells. If your online marketing fails to pull in prospects, then you may be missing some essential digital marketing features.
There are plugins and website features that make your life easier. Having a place for people to comment, send you information, and follow or sign up for content can reduce the amount of effort it takes to connect with online customers.
Better Comments Setup
It’s hard to get someone to comment on your blog when the act of leaving a comment is so difficult! Make it easy for them with an awesome comment plugin like Disqus, CommentLuv, or the like to get more people engaged in your website content.
Call-to-Action & Unique Value Proposition
There are two things a solid brand identity and your business website absolutely need to succeed. First, you want a strong Call-to-Action (CTA) that compels your visitors to move down the sales funnel. Second, you need a Unique Value Proposition (UVP) front and center to immediately convey what it is that you offer and a unique reason they should choose you over the competition.
Contact, Order, or Request Form
Almost any business website will benefit from a contact form that allows customers to instantly “reach out” online. Depending on your type of business website, you can add a contact form that sends messages straight to your email inbox or allows customers to request and order specific information or products. A form on your website allows customers to interact with you at any time and will keep you from losing business.
Automated Marketing System
There are two parts to an automated marketing system, the offensive and the defensive. The offense of marketing automation takes the shape of content marketing campaigns that help you build a sales funnel. Offers that insist customers “sign up” using an email allow you to capture a lead and nurture the customer until they are ready to make a purchase.
On the other hand, the defense is analytics. Integrating a good marketing analytics system is an essential aspect of succeeding online. It’s always a good idea to check your website monthly for internal errors, and get a good overview of top pages, keywords, and “user flow.” This will help you adapt more effective marketing campaigns. It’s a good idea to get an overview of each system by comparing marketing automation platforms, since they are highly customizable, and certainly not “one size fits all.”
Responsive Web Design
The future of website design is mobile. Last year Google reported more searches on mobile than desktop in 10 countries, including Japan and the United States. Together smartphones and tablets equal 29 percent of total searches via Google. This means that mobile strategy is becoming increasingly important for online marketing. To get the best mobile friendly website available, try a responsive web design that responds and fits the screen size of any device. How does it do it? It just knows, (but really, thank your programmer — it’s all in the HTML).
Link to Your Social Media
You want people to follow you, right? To get more people “hooked” on your brand name, you’re going to have to give them something to grab onto. Adding your social media icons to the top of your pages, on blog articles, email signatures, and pretty much anywhere that’s appropriate is a great way to add more website visitors and contacts to your online community. You can even add a Facebook “like” box, Twitter feed, Instagram feed, Pinterest plugin (for sharing pictures), or other social media plugins to connect your online profiles.
SEO Plugin
An SEO Plugin is just what you need to double-check the search engine optimization “health” of your pages before publishing. Plugins like Yoast SEO allow you to add and customize your meta descriptions, and inspect the SEO on the page by establishing target keywords. Yoast SEO lets you know whether your on-page SEO is going to be effective with ratings from red to, orange, yellow, and green, with green being the best.
Faster Cache Plugin
Slow website dragging you down? Good site speed is key for User Experience (UX). One thing you can do to speed up your pages is install Comet Cache (formerly Zen/Quick Cache). Cache is a temporary place your computer stores online page data. This means that your computer stores stuff it sees on a particular website, and (using quick cache) renews this information without rewriting everything over again. It saves your HTML and serves it from the cache instead of reloading the PHP scripts from WordPress every time you make a change. Voila — your site loads faster for visitors!
List of Prices
Instant gratification is becoming an online trend. Oftentimes, the customers who visit your website want to see the numbers. Many customers who search around for products online are there to compare prices. Believe it or not, this could mean the difference between winning and losing business. Prices are not perfect for all websites, and it’s a good idea to A/B test pricing pages to see if they successful.
Business Blog
Is blogging uncool? You might think so, but this has no bearing on your success in the marketing world. The reality is that you need a blog. Why? Because you have to please the search engines to get more online customers. Members of your target audience can be found using the keywords and queries your customers have entered with a search.
Using these keywords throughout your website and blog by regularly posting increases the chances that your pages will be found. More importantly, the search engines like fresh content. They crave it. The more you post fresh content, the more chance you have to rank with Google search engine.
What else do you think is missing from most business websites?
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