4 easy ways to make visitors love your website

Your website is your digital office… is it receiving your visitors well?

There are millions of websites today in any niche you can think of, all run by both business people and hobbyists, and based on this, consumers are flooded with information which then makes it difficult for them to narrow things down.

Content curating websites are trying to make it easy for consumers to access the information they need in a more simplified format. Tools such as “Google Alerts” are also effective, because it helps people filter through the noise and receive information that’s relevant to them.

But where does that leave you?

If you are a small business owner, freelancer, startup, coach, consultant, or someone who runs a personal blog, how do you stand out in a noisy digital world, and attract your ideal audience (i.e. getting people to visit and spend time on your website)?

Let’s look at 4 easy ways you can make visitors love your website:

#1. Address their pressing questions upfront

People who visit certain websites go there to access information or find answers to their pressing questions. Sadly, majority of websites are focused on the owners, as opposed to making it about the visitor.

The truth is, you can’t address every question, because you can’t really determine what these questions are, but you can at least show that you understand your audience. How? You can do this by making sure your homepage focus on the visitor, not yourself, or business, or awards, or any other thing that points to you.

The first thing visitors should see on your homepage should pertain to them. More often than not, businesses plaster their website’s homepage with “about us” info or product features, which in all honesty does not appeal to the visitor. People only care about themselves, so when they see that the website they’re on is only talking about how great the business is, they’ll tune off and leave the website.

Depending on the type of business you’re running, you may need to create an FAQ section, in order to help address some of these questions (this works well for business within SaaS industry).

#2. Make it easy to navigate

Have you ever been to a website with way too many navigation options, which left you confused, and your head spinning? There are countless of them out there (is yours in the mix as well?).

Authority websites such as Mashable, Huffington Post, etc, and big businesses can get away with these types navigational clutter, but as a small business owner, you’ll pretty much be shooting yourself on the foot. If your website is confusing for your visitors, then you’re going to drive them away.

To solve this issue, do your best to minimise your primary navigation to 4 menu options, at most 6. If need be, you can add a few sub-menu drop downs (between 3 and 4). The best approach would be to create a sitemap on your website or pages directory (where people can go to access links to information easily). You can also use the footer section of your website to highlight some key sections of your website.

Keep it simple and clean as much as possible!

#3. Reduce the load time

According to this post (and infographic) on Kissmetrics, website visitors are likely to wait for 6-10 seconds before abandoning a website. However, there are people who don’t mind waiting for a website to load, especially if they know the information they need is on that website (don’t bank on it tough).

Website speed is very important, especially in to today’s world of mobile technological advancement. People are more prone to checking out information via their mobile devices, while on the go. If your website loads very slow, they are bound to leave.

Sometimes the fault may not be from your website, but from the visitor’s internet service; sadly, most people do not think of it that way, and will always point the blame towards the website (you can’t please everyone). But that’s not a ticket to ignore how fast your website loads.

A few tools to consider when looking to test your website’s speed:

• GTmetrix
• Google’s Pagespeed
• Pingdom

Know some more tools that can be used for this purpose? Leave yours on the comment section below 🙂

#4. Provide ‘value based’ content

Content marketing is nothing new, and it’s one of the key ways businesses use to attract people to their websites in this digital age. The more you create and distribute value based content via your website, the more you’ll attract both returning and new visitors.

When it comes to website visits, business owners tend to focus on “page views”, which is the wrong metric to track. “Time spent” on a page should be the key focus, when looking at your website’s analytical data. When your content is valuable to the reader, they will stay longer on your website, and that can help boost your ranking on Google, because Google looks at content relevance.

Bear in mind that this is not about how well you’ve done your SEO. Most business owners focus on writing for “crawlers” instead of writing for people who actually need to the information. Create content that will make people subscribe in order to get more from you.

The best approach to creating “value based content” is to listen to your audience, ask questions, collect data from social media, and write in their “language.”

Conclusion

I always say that a business’s website’s homepage is their digital receptionist, which means that the impression they get on the homepage will determine if they’ll trust the business, and return to the website, or leave it completely… never to return.

Like I mentioned earlier, you can’t really please everyone, so in the attempt to set things right within your website, don’t overdo things, and end up losing out completely. There are people within your niche who are your ideal audience, and these are the people you need to focus on.

Make it about them, with a unique user experience, and content that will help them achieve results, which will then place you and your business in their minds, if possible, at all times.

Your turn… what other ways do you think we can use to make our website visitors love our websites? Comment below, and share this post on your social media networks.

To your success!