What do people do before they buy from your business?

Current research supports the idea that people search online to find out information about your business before they buy from you or hire your business. Because of this, you will need to have a website that works well. It is not good enough to just have a website, however. You will want your website to be well-designed to present a good image of your business.

Here are some website design tips that will help you achieve this goal.

Keywords

Search engines have the task of classifying and organizing websites in order to provide users with the most relevant search results. How do the search engines do this? Primarily through keywords. Throughout your website, you will want there to be keywords related to your business. Some important keywords are the services you offer, the customers or businesses you offer your services to, and the geographical location of your company and the customers your serve. Try to predict what potential customers will search for and adjust accordingly.

For example, if you are a web designer and you want to target the San Diego market. You want to include keywords like San Diego web designer or web designer in San Diego or web design company in San Diego.

Communication

This is simple: make it easy for customers to communicate with your business. You can do this by including contact information on each page. The best ways to do this by having your phone number in the header area and your physical address in the footer area of every page. You may also consider using social media to connect with customers. Joining Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, for example, can help your business improve its reputation and make customers feel cared for.

Navigability

Your website can have the best content on it, but if users cannot find information quickly, it will be unsuccessful. Therefore, one of the website design tips is to make your website easy to navigate. The first step you can take is to make it easy for visitors to read your pages. Do this by having the most important content near the top and left portions of the page. Make your headings bold and include subheadings if necessary. The next step is to include headers on each page that include links to important pages (like the homepage and your about page). Do not have too many links to click on because the visitor might become lost or overwhelmed.

Speed

The best websites load quickly. Make sure your homepage is not cluttered with content. This will ensure a quick-loading website. Optimize the size of your images. Too much content on a page will slow down your loading time. There is no standard in terms of load time, but anything under 3 seconds is good.

Credibility

Here are two more website design tips. You want visitors to take your business seriously. You should use consistent fonts, appropriate colors, and professional visual content. If you are unsure about adding in another photo or video, choose not to add it. In other words, keep things simple.

Additionally, you want to establish the credibility of your business. You can include customer testimonials, a work portfolio, or awards that your business has won. When customers can trust your business, your success rate will increase.

Interactivity

Lastly, you will want to present visitors with instructions on what to do next. The main goal of doing this is to get visitors to take the next step with your business. This can be as simple as including an email form that they can fill. Here are some calls-to-action that you can consider: download a brochure, call the business, make a purchase, request an appointment or consultation, or sign up for a weekly newsletter.

When you follow these tips, your small business will have a website above most. The best part is that these steps do not require much time or effort on your part.