5 key elements every website needs for maximum impact

What do you want your website to do?

Sounds simple but so many people expect that as soon as they get a website then the visitors are going to start flooding in along with all this extra income. Which is the same as buying a lottery ticket and hoping you will win – there’s a small chance you will but if you do really want millions of pounds you are probably going to have to come up with a better plan.

So the first thing you need to make sure your website has is a mission, what do you want it to do? And I don’t mean make you more money (we all want that!) but how is it going to do that? Really break down the steps in how your website can help you achieve that.

What is your current client process and how can you replicate (and automate!) that on your website? Every business will be different so don’t just copy someone else’s in the hope it will work, really get to know your customers and selling process.

So for me, although I sell online products, more often than not the first clear step to working with WWW is to book a free chat. Whether that’s for website creation or even to chat about what support you need or what options are best for you. Yes, I daily have emails and messages asking more about what I do but I know that in my business when someone is ready to take the first step they book a call.

So that’s my website mission, to create my website in such a way that it not only automates the process of booking a call but it makes it as easy as possible to achieve and it’s obvious on my website that’s what I want visitors to do.

OK, so now you have your website mission, another key element every website needs for maximum impact are clear calls to action.

As I said above, you need to make it really obvious that’s what you want visitors to do on your website to achieve that. Many people don’t like decisions so you need to tell them what to do, without overwhelming them.

Clear calls to action are how you do that. Notice I said CLEAR – so no hiding links away in the text or having tiny buttons that blend in with your colour scheme. Make them bold and obvious and the text on them really clear about what will happen when they click that button (note: Google hates read more, click here etc. as it’s not descriptive enough).

Don’t have people go looking for them either, make sure there’s a call to action as soon as they land on your website (in case they are already ready to get going!) and then in various places throughout your copy. Although don’t spam, make the customer journey flow for them – if they are not ready to achieve your mission right now, what else do they need to know first, then next, then after that?

Cash may in some worlds be king, but in the world of websites it’s content that’s king! The content on your site is what the search engines will pick up and the quality of that content is what will help them decide where you should be placed in their search rankings. 

Google (or your visitors!) are not interested in you spending half a page welcoming visitors to your website, you need clear, impactful content that tells visitors exactly what you do, how you do it, who you do it for and why they should choose you over someone else.

No fluff, you will just lose their interest. They are not on your website to be welcomed or even learn all about every single thing you have done since you are born. The only thing they care about is them, their problem and how you can help them.

Give them that!

How many of you have visited a website and got so fed up as there are so many options, you can’t find what you are looking for or things are not obvious?

Having an easy to use website is crucial to make maximum impact on your visitors. Think back to past experiences on other websites and what really put you off.

For me it’s hard to read text as it’s over an image, phone numbers that are not click to call, no internal linking (leading visitors to other pages naturally within your content instead of them using the menu – Google loves this!), not being optimised for mobile, complicated navigation menus, a long drawn out process to buy (or no process at all apart from contact me – no I don’t want to I just want to buy!) as well as over complicated websites with so many options and so many decisions it makes me feel like my heads going to blow up.

I could probably think of loads more but those are off the top of my head! Oh, another one – break up your content with headings and images to make it more visual than a whole page of text. I’m a scan reader and quickly lose interest and miss information when text is not broken up.

These visitors don’t owe you anything, they are not there for you, specifically, they are on your website as they have a problem and they are looking for someone that can solve it as easily as possible, so your website needs to be super simple to use.

Don’t make it hard for them!

The last key element every website needs for maximum impact is SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is about organically getting your website seen in the search engines.

This is a drawn out process and doesn’t happen overnight and requires far more than adding a couple of keywords to a page and the next day you will be number 1 in Google and have floods of traffic to your website.

It’s all about choosing the right key phrases (as one word is far to general) and implementing them correctly, as well as providing relevant and up to date content and creating back links (referrals from other websites).

If you want to learn more about the basics of search engine optimisation then I have a low cost course that will help you do just that (see below for the bright blue call to action!!)