10 Must-Haves for Your Company Website
As a business owner, having a website is crucial to running a successful business. Many businesses within the UK and the world at large have a website because of the numerous benefits it offers. Whether you are a sole trader or a limited company or you are a sophisticated entrepreneur or service provider, having a website for your business is essential.
That being said, there are some features and tools that must be contained on your company’s website to make it a fully functioning, relevant, and result-oriented one. In this guide, we will take a look at the 10 must-haves for your company website. Now, let's dive in.
10 Must-Haves for Your Company Website
Here are the 10 things your company website must have.
1. A Call to Action(CTA)
A website without a call to action is an inaccurate one. A call to action is as important as having a website itself. Simply put, they are like forces that propel potential clients or customers to take a specific action. They are used on the website to get visitors to purchase an item, sign up for a newsletter, download a piece, and so on.
Because CTA can potentially help many visitors sign a deal with you or purchase an item or buy to your service, they must be included in strategic places on your website. If your company sells a product, then a call to action should be placed underneath or above each product showcased. If it’s a service CTA should be made available on several pages of your website.
The logic here is to have a CTA on many pages of your website, such that visitors can easily sign up for a deal with your company. For example, the top of your website homepage should have a call to action, your blog’s concluding part, and your product or service description page should have one. Although there are no rules as to where the CTA could be, the trick is that it must be easily visible to your online visitors.
Ideally, a good CTA must be easily noticeable. Thus you should use a bright colored button or a hyperlink where necessary, to easily distinguish it from other text. Also, be sure and clear about the action you want your potential buyers to take when creating a CTA. Your CTA should lead them to a form, page, or place where they can take action immediately and not necessarily have to meddle back and forth between several pages.
2. Contact Information
Your company contact information is one of the popular ways to get customers across to you. So you wouldn’t want to mix things up by not including them on your website. Usually, most companies would prefer to have a separate page for their contact information. This page therefore should contain several ways in which people can contact your business including your company phone number, office address, email address, and so on.
If there is a change of email address or office address in the future, be sure to update this as soon as possible. Also to make things easier, you should include your contact information page in the menu bar on your home page. You could also include some contact information in the footer of some pages on your website.
3. Highly responsive website
While getting other things set, be sure your website is fully ready and highly responsive in terms of speed. Most people have a short attention span when it comes to visiting a website and they’d prefer browsing through a website that takes little time to load than one that takes a longer time. It is therefore important to do all things possible to ensure that your website is highly responsive taking 1-3 seconds for it to come up.
As such you should get a very fast cache plugin on your website. What the cache does is to help your website load faster by reducing its loading time to the least. Remember that even if you have juicy and attractive offers or content on your website, it is only when customers view it that they can take action.
4. A Navigation map
A clear navigation map out of the company web pages makes it easier for visitors to easily browse through your website. Some potential customers are willing and ready to go through your website properly before signing any deal with you. Experiencing difficulty in navigating several pages of your website could easily turn people off.
Importantly, your menu or navigation bar should contain an essential list of pages your visitors could be searching for. Also, it will be more helpful if you have a sitemap on the menu bar of your home page. On this sitemap, you will have a list of all pages on the website and links that directly lead to the pages.
5. Social Media handles
Another important thing that should be included on your website is your company’s social media handles. Social media is a great way to connect with your previous and potential customers. With handles like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, and many more, you can have a conversation with a potential customer at any time of the day. Even when potential customers aren’t ready to buy your company's product at the moment, social media is a great way they could easily connect with you when they’re ready to buy.
As such, there should be a link that leads people to your social media handles. You could place these links in the symbolic form at the footer of your website. Just like including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter symbols at the footer of your website. Also, these links should be available on the contact information page of your website.
6. SEO marketing
SEO marketing makes your website easily found by potential customers. Apart from designing a website, you should do everything necessary to make sure that people find your website on search engines. To achieve that, then you must get the tricks to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
SEO involves the process of improving the quality and numbers of traffic generated to your website organically. There is a list of factors to consider when setting up your website for SEO. All of these factors are what search engines like Google use in ranking websites when a term is searched on them.
Some of these factors include page titles, metadata, and many more. To make SEO practices more feasible, it is important to include SEO plugins like Yoast SEO on your website. This will help you improve your SEO by indicating the pages on your website that are doing well and those that need adjustments.s
7. A Company Blog
Beyond taking note of SEO plugins, it is important to start creating blog posts on your website once you have one. Creating meaningful content on your website directly tells the client that you are knowledgeable about the service or products that you render. More so, they’ll be willing to learn more from your website.
Apart from that, blogs are a great way to keep visitors engaged as they could potentially lead to a customer. However, you should remember to always provide a call to action at the end of your blogs.
Having valuable content on your website also indirectly helps search engines showcase your website whenever a related term is being searched. Ideally, your blog post would focus on topics related to your business and field.
So, whenever a term associated with any of these blog topics is being searched, search engines automatically bring out these pages. From this, you could potentially be getting good sales.
Importantly, when creating content for this blog, ensure that the content is original, grammatically correct, error-free, non-plagiarised, and relevant. All of these are important for your blog post to be ranked on search engines.
8. Frequently Asked Question section
Another way to make navigation within your site easy is to include a frequently asked section on your website. If there are common questions that potential customers do ask, then it will be great to provide answers to them in a section. If there are also pages on your website that answer a specific question, then you should provide a link to the page in the FAQ section.
9. Company’s review and testimonials
Including reviews and testimonials is a must. You can have this on a separate page on your website or the last sections of the welcoming page. Reviews don’t lie and most customers will be willing to patronize your business once they see good and authentic reviews of your company. More so, reviews help build more trust and credibility with customers.
The reviews and testimonials could be in written or video forms. If they are videos, you would want to upload them on your website. With the introduction of Google hotspot and Google Places, it is even now easier for many businesses like yours to get customer reviews.
10. A mission and About Us page
A mission, about us, and Vision statement page is also an important aspect that must be on your company website. These would not only help potential customers understand your brand better but they will also help build trust with your business if curated properly.
The About Us page tells your website visitors who you are, what you do, and what your company team looks like while your mission and vision statement tells visitors what you can do for them, how you can help their business grow, and your company’s short and long term goals and so on.
Other Tips to Note When Launching Your Website
Apart from the points discussed above, the below points should be taken into consideration when creating and launching your website.
1. Professional logo, images, and branding
Images, logos, and videos on your website should be of good quality. Apart from that they should be professional and attention-grabbing. If your company sells a product, then the product description catalogue should clearly show as many pictures of the items as possible.
If your company is service-based, you will still need to upload pictures and videos at some section of your website and this must be done professionally. Your home page and other pages within your website should contain only professional and high-quality pictures.
2. Check out for website upload errors more often
One critical mistake you can be making is not checking out on your website every time. Your company’s website is like an asset to your business and should be taken care of more often. One common error most web users know and have experienced is the 404 error. So be sure that every page on your website is accessible at the time.
3. Be objective
The home page and other pages of your website must be objective. The copy on your website should clearly explain what your company is into. Website visitors are quick to log out of a website when they don’t find what they want. So from the home page, be objective enough to explain or list what your company does.
4. Use Mobile friendly web design
When you are launching your website, be sure to note that the website can easily be accessed on almost all devices. It should be easily accessed through mobile phones, laptops, iPads, and lots more. In short, your web design should be able to adjust to fit all screen sizes.
Missing out on this could cost you a lot as most people who visit your website do that with a mobile phone. So in order not to lose more traffic and sales, you should make sure your website is responsive on all devices.
5. Use a simple web address
It is usually a good idea when you choose a simple, easy-to-read, and relevant web address. A website visitor is more likely to remember your website address if it is simple and resonates with their search term. The easier it is for people to remember your web address, the more likely they are going to revisit your website for your product or service when needed.
Conclusion
A must-have for all businesses is a company’s website. While you must launch a website for your company, the following points explained above must be taken into cognizance. Following this procedure and including the correct tools could help your website generate more traffic and increase sales. if you have any questions about what your website must have, kindly contact our expert for help.