Although the Internet is offering unprecedented opportunities for businesses to grow and expand, the online world still remains one of the most competitive spaces. Customers have access to hundreds and even thousands of options right on their fingertips. That means you need to work harder and smarter to ensure you’re attracting customers to your website – this article will go through a few ways you can do just that – optimize your website to attract more customers.
Social Media Integration
Social media has become an integral part of our society – people usually love to talk about the new products they bought, recommend them to other people, and bond over the brands they like most – you can leverage this to your advantage. Integrating social media functionality into your website is a great way of attracting new customers – imagine, just a single person in a month sharing one of your products on social media would mean hundreds of new eyeballs and perhaps a few more sales – this adds up in the long run. That’s why it is essential to optimize your website for social media use and make it really easy for people to share your products and services.
If you’re building your own website, social media integration might be harder than it seems. Especially if you’re a designer, and you are trying to convert sketch to HTML. You might be better off hiring an agency to help you with it.
Search Engine Optimization
While most people assume they need to optimize their website for and only for humans, this is no longer the case – more than 90% of customers find websites through search engines, and these search engines determine which website comes up first, which comes up second, and which doesn’t show up at all. That’s why it is perhaps more important to optimize your website for search engine algorithms. Because the first and tenth place on the Google Search Engine Results Page is a difference of potentially thousands of visitors each day. There are a few ways of optimizing your website for search engines:
Make sure the bots have ample information about your website: the crawlers search engines use don’t understand websites as humans do. For example, they look at the alt-text of images to understand its content, they look at page metadata to check its relevance, etc. When you try to optimize your website for search engines, you need to keep these things in mind.
Target specific search keywords: the Internet is a vast place, and only a small part of it is relevant to you. You don’t want only more eyeballs on your website, but you want those people to be potentially interested in your products and services. That’s why you need to make sure you’re targeting search phrases relevant to your business. It doesn’t matter if you rank the first for “cute baby t-shirts” on Google if your company is selling women’s clothes. These people will just press back and continue searching. So, it isn’t only important to increase traffic, but it is important to ensure the traffic is from relevant sources.
Messaging
The website’s code shouldn’t be the only thing you’re optimizing, because the content on your website has a significant impact on visitors and much more important sales, as well. The way you present your company: its tagline, the opening paragraphs, the names of the products, these all need to be optimized to ensure the largest amount of sales. But, you’ll soon find out that optimizing your messaging can be oftentimes harder than optimizing code: you can empirically test which piece of code loads faster, for example, but it is much harder to empirically test which product description results in more sales.
