Clearly defined goals and calls to action

The driving goal behind all the pages of carefully crafted content and creative you develop for your website should be to engage visitors in your message and move them from your landing page (the page that appears when they click on a search result that leads them to your site) to fulfilling a specific call to action. Your call to action may be for visitors to request a demo, call your sales team, download a paper, register for an event, or fulfill an online transaction.

The first step in building a website, then, is to define the goals or purpose of your web page and the actions you want visitors to take.

Easy-to-follow navigation

Easy-to-follow navigation is a critical component of a successful website. With countless template options available across many website builder platforms, it’s fairly simple to ensure your website is easy to navigate.

Website builders help you set up categories and tabs for your information, create a logical and an easy-to-follow flow, and organize your site’s content. Although it seems like a no-brainer to just follow the template’s directions to build your website, it isn’t always easy to organize your content in ways that keep visitors on a journey to closing a sale or completing another action, and enable them to quickly find what they want.

When building your navigation paths, keep in mind why visitors come to your site. Do they come to find product information, make a transaction, or compare you to competitors? Or download content that can help them make informed decisions about your category and brand?

Your navigation needs to make it easy for your visitors to find the trailhead to the path they want to take immediately upon landing on your site. Label your tabs according to the most traveled paths on your site and provide buttons and hot links throughout the site so visitors can find what they want no matter which page they’re on at any given time.

You should also make it easy for visitors to find

• An email address for your customer service, sales, and support staff
• General and department phone numbers
• Contact Us and demo request forms
• Live chat links

Clean and inviting design

Your website design is critical to the image you project about your brand, products, or services. As I note when I talk about creative strategy in Chapter 8, your website is where you need to use the colors, iconology, fonts, and images you’ve identified as relevant to the personas, lifestyles, and values of your target customers. All the elements and sections of your website should consistently adhere to your creative strategy. These include:

• Landing pages, such as your home page and blog
• Copy blocks
• Testimonial and case study pages
• Contact Us forms and e-commerce pages
• Resources pages (for example, video and content link pages)

One of the most important elements of design is white space. Websites crammed full of copy and photos take too much time and effort to read and understand. Visitors don’t want to have to work that hard to follow your message and discover your offers and value to them. Maintaining white space throughout your site makes it easy for visitors to scan your content and quickly find what they’re there to find. Both outcomes are critical to maintaining a healthy session duration and bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who leave your site without taking action), and avoiding “rudeness” (see the nearby sidebar “Is your website polite or down-right rude?”).

Meaningful content that adds value

The first headline on your website is far more important than you may realize. According to digital marketing analysts, your website has less than a second to project relevance to visitors, and your supporting copy has 15 seconds to capture their attention and inspire further reading.

To achieve longer dwell time, or longer session durations that can lead to conversions, you need to keep your content focused on what matters most to consumers.

Interaction that pulls visitors into your brand story

The NTL Institute has long studied retention from various styles of learning. They’ve found that a lecture-based, classroom atmosphere results in around 5 percent retention of the content presented, while activity-based learning achieves a 75 percent retention rate. The same principle applies to website engagement.

The longer you are actively engaged on a website doing something you deem to be of value to you, the more you’re likely to view additional pages, recall the information you browsed, and convert to the desired call to action. Consider:

• More than 95 percent of participants in a Demand Metric study stated that interactive content impacts buyers’ behavior along the decision journey.
• Between 60 percent and 75 percent of marketers participating in a survey by the Content Marketing Institute rated website elements such as assessments, calculators, contests, quizzes, and even games as highly effective during the discovery stage of a consumer’s decision process.

While technology is making it more affordable to incorporate interactivity into your website, you shouldn’t do something just because you can. If you’re going to put a game or quiz on your site, it needs to be highly relevant to your brand or category, and the experience most likely to convert visitors to customers.

Many forms of interactivity are simple and affordable yet powerful for keeping people engaged on your website and increasing their page views. Here’s list of some effective and easy-to-use interactive elements, tools, and strategies:

• Slide shows featuring hot topics and news. Putting a slide show at the top of your landing page that auto rotates slides featuring hot topics, current news, and business updates is a great way to get people engaged in your content without having to begin scrolling. Slide shows are most effective when kept to 3 or 4 slides that rotate every 2 to 3 seconds.
• Videos that tell compelling stories. Video is a highly effective way to increase stickiness, sometimes called dwell time, which in turn improves SEO results and customer conversion. The key is to make sure the content is relevant to the decision process, energetic enough to keep visitors’ attention, and just 30 to 60 seconds in length. Brief, fast-paced testimonial videos are a good example of videos with watching power.
• Tools that help visitors with calculations and decision planning. If you are in the financial services field, calculators to help customers compute mortgage, car loan, home equity, and other payments are highly effective. These tools keep people on your site as they calculate various scenarios and get them to come back every time they want to calculate something new.
• Live chat that answers visitors’ burning questions. A study by eMarketer showed that 63 percent of customers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. Another study by Forrester reported that people who engage in live chat are nearly three times more likely to convert to the desired action. Live chat plays to our need for instant gratification and our growing preference to communicate by typing instead of talking. Many providers of customer relationship management systems, like HubSpot, offer live chat platforms for your website that you can staff with employees who can talk about your brand and serve your customers.

• Brand communities that bring customers together. Online communities like Reddit have gained a lot of traction among social media users and likely will continue to be popular for a long time. We seek tribes of people like ourselves, online and off-line, and we often ask our tribes for shopping advice or validation for decisions we have just made, opinions we hold, and so on. Creating a community chat forum on your site that allows customers and prospects to mingle and discuss usage stories for your product can help convert visitors and increase loyalty for existing users. Encouraging user-generated content from your community members can create fun engagement as well.

  Brand communities can backfire when users post negative comments and stories, and they require constant monitoring so you can respond to comments and provide your brand’s view. If you allow user-generated content, you will need someone to vet the content before it’s posted to weed out inappropriate posts, comments, and images.

Direct relevance

Users leave a website within 10 to 20 seconds if they don’t find something of direct relevance to the need they’re looking to fill. Adding information that’s intuitive to users’ reasons for visiting your site can ease the decision process and keep them dwelling on your pages longer, increasing your chances of deeper engagement and conversion.

Consider the intuitive nature of websites for ski resorts during ski season. You log on and immediately see widgets that show snow totals, current and forecasted weather, and even wait times for ski lifts. You easily find links to lift ticket sales, restaurants, and things to do at the resort. And, of course, you see a beautiful visual of an amazing skier doing just what you want to be doing in all that powder and sunshine. All this information allows you to see yourself in the brand’s story and inspires you to stay on the site planning your dream ski vacation.

All brand communication must present something of real and direct value to consumers. Otherwise, they will not stay on your website, browse through your pages, open your emails, and move toward completing a sales transaction. Your mission is to assure your website uses words and images that relate to the customer’s needs, not yours. Showing a photo of your product in its packaging is not as compelling as showing the joy someone might receive from the product or service you offer.

Aligning with what customers expect to see

Just like perception is everything when it comes to your web identity, expectations are everything when it comes to keeping people engaged on your website. Across categories, consumers expect to find certain elements on websites that help them quickly get information about products, offers, pricing, values, and a brand’s credibility.

To meet expectations and increase dwell time, adhere to the following guidelines:

• Lead with clarity about your offerings and value. It’s amazing how many times I scroll through a website and leave wondering what the business actually does. A headline that clearly states what you offer and what your offerings mean for customers is a critical element for keeping people on your site.

  Ask people in your personal and professional circles to visit your site and tell you how they interpret what you do, what you offer, and how you add value for customers. Consider the various feedback you get and use it to improve your messaging.

• Include sufficient product detail. Your product information needs to be very detailed so visitors know precisely what to expect from each product and how your product’s specifications compare to others. When shopping online, people want to get the information they need quickly. If they can’t find the details they’re looking for, they will go to another site.

  Posting simple, outcome-oriented bullets is better than writing long sentences or paragraphs. Create a bullet list of specifications, materials, services included, ancillary offerings, and other relevant information to give visitors a comprehensive view of your product.

• Present your company leadership team. Many purchasers, especially in the B2B sector, want to know about the leadership of a business. If they’re buying IT or a software application they’ll need to live with for a few years, they want to know how stable and experienced your leaders are so they can determine your staying power or the likelihood that you’ll be acquired by another company, which can often mean compromised service for acquired customers. They may even want to know who some of your investors are for added assurance that you have the ability to fund your growth and maintain their account. Include short bios for executive team members on your About Us page to showcase the minds driving your company.

• Include testimonials from satisfied customers. Consumers want to know what others are saying about their experience with your products and service. Even though it’s a given that brands feature only positive reviews, it still helps prospects see who your customers are, who they can call to ask questions, and what kind of outcomes they can expect if they choose your brand.

  Prospects not only read your testimonials but may call customers you list on your site. Update your list of testimonials to remove any customers no longer working with you or any that may have had a negative experience since posting their story. Even a small complaint can send a prospect to your competitors.

• Communicate your corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Consumers care what brands are doing to give back to communities and make the world a better place. They want to support movements that align with their values, not just help shareholders advance their goals.

  The 2021 Porter Novelli Purpose Premium Index showed that 73 percent of consumers say that to win their support, a brand must show how they are supporting communities and the environment. Not having a comprehensive statement about your CSR commitments and contributions on your website is akin to inviting visitors to go elsewhere.

• List your policies, FAQs, and terms. Consumers want easy access to your return policy, shipping methods and costs, customer service processes, sizing guides, and so on. If they can’t find this information quickly on your site, they’re more likely to go to another site that makes it faster and easier to find the details that create a high level of confidence in their purchasing choices.
• Showcase transaction efficiency. People expect to be able to find what they want quickly on e-commerce sites and check out as easily as possible. The longer it takes to check out, the more likely they are to leave. Amazon caters to this with its Buy Now button, which allows customers to skip many of the time-consuming checkout steps. Make it easy to find the Add to Cart buttons, and make it fast and easy to check out.

The quicker people find what they want, the longer they’ll stay on your site and the greater your chances of closing the sale. Dwell time, or how long a person stays on your site before bouncing off to another, is a key metric for the success of your website and something you can easily measure with web analytics.

Expanding your web imprint

Identifying a list of URL names that define what you do and purchasing them for your website will help you expand your digital footprint. For example, if your business is a pet boarding facility called Five Star Lodging for Pets, you should not only get the URL for your name but also consider purchasing a categorical URL such as www.petlodging.com, www.luxuryhotelfordogs.com, or www.safeboardingforpets.com.

If another brand has a categorical name that also reflects what you do, consider adding a word like best, leading, or popular to the beginning of your URL to tap into traffic that may be going to a competitor.

Take the time to register all possible URLs and nicknames for your brand before someone else does and then tries to sell them to you at an inflated price. If you’re a consultant, register your personal name and your brand name. URLs can be purchased affordably in most cases. A good site for browsing what’s available, and prices, is Godaddy (www.godaddy.com).

Register all possible suffixes and brand references as well. For example, Intermountain Healthcare, which owns hospitals and clinics in a tristate area, owns the domains www.intermountainhealthcare.org and www.ihc.org. It also owns the .com and even the .biz versions of those domain names. Purchasing and redirecting all potential URLs drives more people to your site while also protecting your identity. If you own the .com version of your URL and someone else owns the .biz version, you can easily get caught up in a case of mistaken identity.

You need to ensure that your domain name doesn’t violate another company’s trademark. Check website addresses against a database of trademarks (in the U.S. by going to www.uspto.gov, clicking on the Trademarks link at the top of the page, and clicking on Searching Trademarks). For more complex trademark issues, you can hire a lawyer to do a detailed analysis.

When purchasing your domain URL and registering your website, you will likely be offered additional options and bundles. These may include email packages, domain protection (covers you from others buying your name if you forget to renew on time), and the .org, .net, .biz and so on version of your URL. Again, there are domain name brokers that buy up a lot of URLs so they can resell them, as well as people are out there just waiting for a site to expire so they can quickly purchase it and sell it back to you.

Integrating key design elements

Your images and headlines create the first impression visitors get of your website and let them know within a second or less if your business is relevant to their needs and personality. Much of this first impression is unconsciously created by the moods and persona created by the style and words of your page. These topics were covered in Chapter 8. After you’ve assured your visitors’ unconscious mind that your site reflects their persona with your initial colors and style, you need to immediately engage their conscious mind by providing resources beyond just products for sale. These resources include interactive tools, decision support, and educational content that helps visitors make informed decisions.

Organizing your site for optimizing clicks on key buttons that take visitors to pages furthers engagement and ultimately transactions. But that is another strategy altogether.

Here are some elements to keep in mind when you’re designing your site that will help you create a memorable first impression and maximize visitors’ dwell time and engagement.

Defining a style that fits your brand persona

Your website’s style should reflect not only your persona but also that of your target audience. Your website builder platform will include literally hundreds of design templates to choose from. Ask yourself the following questions to help you choose one with optimum appeal:

• What’s your brand’s personality? Spunky, traditional, reserved, outgoing, daring, rebellious, or trendsetting?
• Which characters, celebrities, or types of people embody that personality?
• What do these people wear every day? To a formal event? Would they show up at a black-tie event in a tux and red high-top sneakers? Would they get married in a black dress?
• What are the status levels your characters or personas seek? What are their aspirations and goals?
• What books do they read? What television shows do they watch? Which Instagram and Twitter accounts do they follow?
• What are the values and causes that matter most to them?

Now take a step back and start thinking of creative elements that embody your answers. How can you use some of them to appeal to your customers? How can you create this appeal quickly with graphics, words, headlines, and images? What do you need to do to ensure that visitors know, consciously and unconsciously, that they’ve found a brand that understands and celebrates them and their personality?

Dwell time and engagement are heavily influenced by the color, fonts, and layout of your page. (Chapter 8 has more details about creative strategies.) If you want people to feel excited and energized by your site, be sure to use energetic colors, fonts, images, and layouts. For example, fun fonts like Chalkboard create a playful, whimsical feeling, while traditional fonts like Times New Roman project an academic, authoritative, or informative tone.

Figure 12-1 showcases a website design that successfully engages visitors and inspires them to dwell longer. The layout presents hot topics relevant to purchasers of software for the waste management industry via a slider (slide show) at the top of the site and lists product features and outcomes before the scroll. This design increased session durations and lowered bounce rates substantially over the prior design.

Wix, a leading website builder platform, has a blog page that lists design ideas for small businesses using their tools. For examples and ideas that you can easily incorporate into your own design, visit www.wix.com/blog/creative.

As you work on the design elements that enhance visitors’ dwell time and engagement on your website, you also need to establish the metrics that matter most for your success. Make sure you take note of some of the following key performance indicators (KPIs) for your website.

Minding your KPIs

Clearly, your first goal in creating a web page is to drive traffic and keep visitors engaged and going deeper into your site. But that’s just the beginning. You need to know what people are doing once they get to your site, which information captures their attention, and how long they stay on your page.

Another KPI many don’t think about is the exit page. Where are customers leaving your site? Is it your product page? Your blog? Your About Us page? You can get that information on your Google Analytics dashboard. Monitor it often to identify content that’s causing visitors to look elsewhere.

Without this information, you really don’t know if your site is relevant to searches for your category and to consumers in general, and whether it’s set up to spark customer journeys that end in a sale or another desired action. The following sections present some KPIs to monitor continuously to ensure your website is optimized for lead generation, retention, and sales.

Google Analytics, a free tool in your Google account, provides a dashboard for all your KPIs and other metrics. Setting it up for your website is as easy as following step-by-step instructions on the Google Analytics home page. Monitoring your site’s traffic and performance should be part of your daily routine.

Keeping content fresh and timely

Publishers regularly produce new stories based on different ideas and topics. Change up your stories and links on your landing page to give visitors a variety of hot topics to browse. For your blog, include content from more than one writer so visitors are exposed to different voices within your brand.

Keep content newsworthy to attract and engage visitors and keep it in line with your sales goals to make sure you’re not providing a free news site but one that will pay off for you as well. Craft stories, reports, insights, and guides that are meaningful and subtly drive people back to you to help them achieve related goals.

Making claims verifiable

Your website content should be built around verifiable facts. The best way to build trust and credibility with consumers is to tell stories you can back up with data that can be proven through sound research methods. Your data should come from sources that can be verified as legitimate.

Reposting articles from authorities in your field and interviewing thought leaders for original content on your page are good ways to source meaningful content. However, you need to assure their claims are verifiable and accurate.

Data is often conveyed in charts and graphs. But data visuals can be very misleading. Pay attention to the scales used in each data presentation to make sure you understand the true story. It’s easy to mislead people by using a graph in one section of an article that shows a bar chart with a scale of 1 – 10, and then another in the same article with a scale of 1 – 100 that looks very similar in scope. Make sure to point changes in scale in reports as needed to avoid being seen as a data manipulator.

Asking engaging questions

A great way to engage customers when they land on your website is to ask them to take a one- to three-question survey to help you better understand what matters most to them. A lot of people like to take surveys so they can see how their peers voted or answered and compare the responses. Ask questions that spark curiosity and help visitors validate their own challenges and needs.

If you’re a B2B site selling marketing services, you may want to ask questions along the following lines:

• What is your #1 marketing challenge?
• On which mediums or channels do you spend most of your marketing resources?
• What do you believe is the most powerful marketing technology for the coming year?

If you’re a B2C or retail site, consider asking questions such as:

• Are you shopping for yourself or for a gift for a friend or family member?
• How often do you shop for items in this category?
• What is your #1 criterion when shopping for items in this category?

Try to get more than just answers out of your surveys. Get email addresses, permission for further communications, and increased dwell time. Here are some ways to do that:

• Ask respondents for their email address so you can send them more information about the topic.
• Offer to direct participants to your archived questions so they can see the results of past surveys, increasing their engagement and time on your site.
• When possible, have the answers to your questions direct visitors to related content on your site. If you ask a question about marketing tools, point participants toward a white paper or competitive analysis on the marketing tools or services you provide.

Maintaining critical content categories

In addition to populating your website with pages about your products and their advantages, you need to maintain some basic content consumers expect to find. This includes the following:

• Compatible or complementary products: This is especially important if you’re a technology company. Purchasers may want to know what other products and platforms you integrate with so they can assess your products’ compatibility and ability to interface with other programs they may have purchased. Linking to pages of products you support helps build valuable SEO links and credibility for your products. Just do so in a way that doesn’t end your visitor session like embedding links for pop-up pages within your blog.
• Resources: Even though you may have a Resources page with blogs, videos, news, case studies, and more, you should incorporate links to this page throughout your site for easy access. These internal links also elevate SEO.
• Career opportunities: Including a page about your job openings will help you attract new employees while boosting your SEO with additional tags and keywords.
• Company background: Add content about your values, experience, passion, and team. This is a critical component of your site because it influences your company’s growth and competencies.
• Contact Information: Make it easy for visitors to find your phone number, link to live chat, and physical locations.

Your content is either static or dynamic. Static content is content that you don’t change much, like your leadership profiles, contact information, mission statement/values, and so on. Dynamic content refers to the content you change often, such as promotions, white papers or case studies, news stories, product highlights, customer highlights and testimonials, and so on.

Using website builders

It goes without saying that you need a platform on which to build your website, and tools for designing and executing it. But choosing a provider may be difficult. When choosing a website builder, look at how users rate the following:

• Price for value provided: What do you pay for bandwidth, technical support, design options, and other key components?
• Ease of use: A drag-and-drop editor is a key indicator of simplicity.
• Support: Hours and responsiveness of the platform’s technical support and live chat staff should be key to your decision.
• E-commerce options: Do they offer e-commerce templates, and do they charge anything besides credit card fees for consumers’ completed transactions?

Browse review sites that list Top 10 website builders (or however many the site reviewed). The top recommendations vary according to review site, so it’s important to look at the features of each platform you’re considering and compare them on your own.

Forbes Advisor reviewed thousands of data points, plan options, and customer feedback for various website builders and came up with the following Top 10 website builders for small businesses in 2022:

• Weebly
• GoDaddy
• IONOS
• Squarespace
• HostGator
• Wix
• Shopify
• Zyro
• WordPress
• Duda

Like anything technological, the features, offerings, and service ratings for these companies will change frequently. Some will keep up with new features better than others, and customer service can go from good to great, and great to bad, in a blink. Check out several website builder review sites and demo the platforms that seem best for your business today, and for the growth you expect in one to five years.

Create your own Top 10 list after reviewing several platforms’ features, prices for storage capacity, technical support, design ease, and e-commerce functionality and support. Research each website builder and then start crossing options off your list until you find the best fit for you.

Finding quality imagery

As you build your site, keep in mind not just the quality of the design and overall experience offered by each template but also the quality of your images. If you use your own photos, make sure the resolution of each image is as good as the artistry, so you look professional, not haphazard.

Beyond the resolution of your photos, use images that show attention to detail. Don’t use a photo of your products in a cluttered environment or pictures of your people covered in shadows or surrounded by crowds not material to the image.

As you map out the pages of your site, list the photos that make sense for the content. Then take the time to shoot clear photos of your people, products, and places of business with good lighting and a clean background. Following are some tips:

• Smartphones have high-quality cameras that provide high enough pixel counts for digital and even print assets. You can also edit photos for proper lighting, shadows, color saturation, size, special effects, and much more directly on your phone. Make sure you do some editing before posting or publishing photos.
• Purchase a small light you can attach to your smartphone to help you take quality photos.
• Consider an ancillary lens for your smartphone so you can zoom in tighter on product details, speakers at events, crowd or landscape shots, and so on without losing quality. Both lights and lenses for smartphones are easy to find at very affordable price points.

You can also buy images fairly inexpensively from many sources, especially if you need them only for your website, because you can purchase low-resolution photos at a lower cost. You can purchase one image at a time or sign up for a package that provides a set number of images per month. Often, the price will vary by the resolution you purchase. Resolution suitable for print is higher than what you need for digital materials, so plan your budget accordingly.

Check out stock photography sources such as Adobe Stock (www.stock.adobe.com), Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com), iStock (www.istockphoto.com), or Shutterstock (www.shutterstock.com). Also look for inspiration on Flickr (www.flickr.com), where photographers set up pages to share their work.

Building websites is fun and gives you many opportunities to release your inner creative. Just remember, the layout, content, words, and designs impact your engagement and business goals much more than just the look and feel presented. Plan your website around the expected experience of your target audiences, your desired outcome for visitors on your site, and the KPIs you define.