Is your website taking you to the top of the game or is it invisible to the world? Many business owners make the mistake of kicking their feet up once their websites are up and running but the job doesn’t end there. In any case, the fun’s just beginning!

Nothing is more important to a business these days than a website that brings leads. Since your website is your company’s front door, it shouldn’t just be “good” but should take you to greater heights by converting viewers into loyal clients and brand ambassadors. That’s our definition of a great website.

The fact is that there is more involved in running a website than what you see on the screen. And with all the hustle and bustle of governing your business, it’s quite easy to get caught up.

Gladly, Stack Mode Marketing Group is always at your service. Our inventive and gifted web designers and marketing team will ensure your website is always up to par.

Let’s run you through our list of the signs of an effective website so that you can check them off your to-do list. Does this sound like a solid plan? Good, let’s begin.

1. Your Website Is Up to Speed

Website speed matters a lot. Even Google declares that website load speed is a major determinant of a quality site because it concerns its search algorithm, so it’s worth taking note of. However, it’s not only Google. We all hate slow websites. Therefore load speed matters to your users as well.

So how do you increase your website speed? There are several ways to speed up your site.

First, and foremost, yours truly, the number one web design company in Reno- our site management team will monitor, analyse and optimize your website to maximize its output, including speeding up its loading time. We do this using subtle design tweaks to supercharge your site such as switching over to SSD Hosting.

SSD, short for Solid State Drives is the ulterior data storage. Compared to traditional drives, SSD packs 100% electronic componentry, much like how electric trains run at lightning speed in comparison to steam trains.

So if you want a reputable and fast way to heighten your website’s speed at an affordable cost, you should go for SSD Hosting.

2. Your Site Is Mobile-Receptive

More individuals lookup websites using their phones than with desktops or laptops. This means that setting up a mobile-friendly website is not something to consider but a must-have at this point.

To add to that, Google issued a warning that it won’t accept non-mobile-friendly sites on its mobile listings. This is more than enough to tell you how serious this issue is. You can assess if your website is mobile-friendly using Google’s mobile checker.

If it doesn’t pass the mark, you can address the issue using two options. The first option is to look into a mobile website builder. This offers you a side by side version of your site that pops up when your website encounters a mobile-based browser.

Option two is to enlist for a full Responsive Web Design (RWD). RWD is a kind of web design method where your website aligns perfectly on any sort of device as it reacts to the browser. Because this option is somewhat costly, you might want to consider option 1. So you don’t burn a hole in your pocket.

3. Your Website Has A Services Page

Do you have service-specific pages? Does it list the services you provide? If so, do the services have individual pages? If your answer is no to the third question, then your website hasn’t quite cut it. Most sites spread themselves thinly by not having individual serviced pages.

Say you do a search on “digital web services in Reno” and Google has to weigh between two pages- one on “digital web services” and the second on “web services”, chances are the first-page option will win. So consider casting a wider net and offering Google more specific content for it to index and rank.

However, don’t confuse creating specific content with keyword stuffing- you can’t outwit the system for sure. For instance, don’t start developing pages like “Affordable Instant Delivery Approved Digital Web Services Reno”. It is not only nonsensical but can also damage the chances of your website ranking. The best thing to do is to make a list of each service you offer and create a unique page for each of them.

4. Your Website Is Secure and Reliable

Another Google ranking gold card is reliability and safety and this comes from using HTTPS Hosting. HTTPS requires securing your website through the use of an SSL certificate.

Now simply applying HTTPS isn’t instantly going to make your site entirely safe nor will it give you a tremendous uplift on the rankings. The key though is to offer your users even the slightest form of security as they are browsing your website.

However, if you want to take your website security measure a notch higher, go for Web Application Firewall. It helps by constantly scanning your site for any security issues and restricts Malware from encroaching into your site.

Often these measures are delivered with a Security Shield, which when reinforced with a secure HTTPS will show your viewers that you take safety seriously.

5. Your Pages Are Favorably Long

Imagine you’re delivering a sales pitch to your potential clients. You want to be as thorough as possible, therefore, you take the time to explain the ins and outs of your products/ services and answer the tons of questions being shoved at you. At the end of the meeting, they will definitely be convinced that you know your stuff and boom! You have new customers.

The same concept should be applied to your service pages. Are they detailed enough? Do they answer some prime questions your users may have as they are perusing your website? If not, you need to solve this.

First, because your visitors and potential clients will highly appreciate the extra mile you’ve taken to inform them so that they make a sure decision.

Second, because Google takes note of this as well. Google surely notices when a page is nicely detailed to keep viewers glued to your website. Google interprets this as a reduced bounce rate, which serves as a positive signal that your page delivers exactly what your visitor is searching for. A lower bounce rate means a higher ranking on Google’s search engines.

“So how long should my pages be?” You might ask. An effective web page is between 500-1000 words. If content creation doesn’t come naturally to you, lucky for you it is one of the many web design services we provide. Our content creators are always on their tippy-toes to create the best page content that’ll get your site’s ranking skyrocketing.

6. You Utilize A Client Relationship Management System (CRM)

Still using email or spreadsheets to monitor clientele data? Huge mistake.

We recommend setting up HubSpot CRM, it stores every single interaction between your business and both potential and current customers. This includes all your phone calls, emails, and live chats (hoping you are using Live Chat!).

The problem with these traditional means of consumer data storage is that they have proved to be extremely time-consuming and disorganized. With Zoho CRM you can share information quickly, attract more leads and monitor all your statistics.

Additionally, introducing an element of automation in to your business allows you to send emails automatically or set reminders that you can follow up later. This guarantees that nothing gets lost between the cracks.

This high level of specialty is what distinguishes an exceptional business website from an amateur one.

7. All Your Pages Are Optimized

Just because you have a captivating website doesn’t mean your work ends there. Optimizing all your site’s pages is equally important. By this, we mean Metatags (Meta title and Meta description), Heading, internal linking and keyword-rich URLs. Top-performing websites usually have well-optimized pages.

Details such as indicating the location and niche in the Title Metatag and using Headings rich in keywords (especially H1 and H2) help you distinguish yourself as the best in class from the mediocre business.

8. You’re Getting Frequent Reviews

Statistics show that the most successful B2B websites have twice the number of Google reviews than lower ranking websites. If you’re a local enterprise, Google Reviews should be particularly important for you.

Obtaining Google Reviews is quite simple- just ask for them! Start with your loyal customers; you already know who they are. Don’t go overboard with getting hundreds of reviews in a single day though. Just form a habit of asking for reviews consistently, and the best time to do so is when you have a happy and satisfied client in front of you.

Begin this exercise right now, determining to get several reviews each month without fail and you’ll start to see its positive impact on your website.

9. Your Website’s Content is Top Notch

Your site’s content is just as important as its design. Imagine that 95%of the web’s information is in the form of a manuscript. With this in mind, a beautifully fashioned website filled with quality content is a match made in heaven!

• First, great content meets viewers’ expectations. For example, if your website is for real estate, most users will expect to see your property listings and directions to where each unit is located.
• Second, meaningful content is trustworthy. Trust is the ultimate key to persuasive power and it makes visitors believe in what you are offering.
• The best way is to include some testimonials on your website that serve as social proofs of your products/services genuineness. This will bolster passers-by confidence in your offerings.
• Third, is your text optimized for scanning? It’s important to adjust your content to visitors’ browsing tendencies. It’s a well-known fact that viewers don’t read everything on websites, they just sweep through.
• When a new user searches a website, the first thing they do is survey the content and categorize it into comprehensive pieces of information. By doing this a viewer is assessing if a website’s content meets his or her needs thus worth reading.

Here are some tips to make your content easier for user scanning:

• Optimize your content layout for the “F pattern.” Research on eye-tracking has shown that viewers scan pages in an F design. They only read the first few lines then start to skip lines down the page. This is why it is crucial to front-load your text by putting the most important information first so that it catches the eye.
• Break text blocks using images. A page with unending blocks of texts is most likely to be skipped. It is better to break up a text using images, headings or bullet points.
• Fourth, the best site content has minimal distractions. Mobile objects like video ads and animated banners easily capture attention but not in a good way. They offer an annoying and distracting experience. If you want a lower bounce rate of your website, then reduce such distracting objects.
• Fifth, make it easy for visitors to contact you. It may seem rather obvious but contact details can be easily overlooked. Contact information such as email addresses and phone numbers should be easily visible.
• Lastly, high-quality videos and relevant images are visually appealing. People grasp concepts quickly when they are delivered visually. A web designer who understands the meaning of the conventional phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” always provides exemplary imagery on their websites.

10. You Utilize Live Chat

If you are serious about your business growth, then Live Chat should already be among your site tools. And block out any voices of doubt in your mind that tell you customers don’t like to chat. The truth is people love to chat, some even more than phone calls because it feels less intimidating. We have adapted to chatting through apps such as WhatsApp. So don’t overlook this incredible tool as it offers so many benefits it’s hard to name all of them at a go.

Well, for starters, a Live Chat says that you take customer delivery seriously. It offers a fast channel to get your prospect’s contact details. It’s anonymous, free and fast to the client’s advantage. It is also efficient as one can chat on several platforms at the same time.

Finally, if your website is getting traffic, then Live Chat is the best mode of measuring the Return on Investment (ROI) in a short time.

Live Chat makes business running so seamless you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it!

11. What Can Affect Your Website's Success?

How then do you make your website meet users’ expectations? You may have applied all these ten steps but still unsure if your website is effective.

Well, you can’t just assume- you need to assess your web design to see how visitors interact with it as well as their emotional reaction to your design.

TETO Test

We advocate the TETO (test early, test often) module to evaluate the success of your web design project.

• Gather qualitative feedback. Observing and interviewing your users gives you answers to many ‘why’ questions such as why do users hesitate to fill out the payment form. You can fix some drawbacks that make your website’s navigation hard to deal with.
• Accept that you possibly won’t build a perfect product from your first attempt. Product design is a continuous journey for both you and your prospects. This means that you design a product, test it, redesign it and test again.
• Use approximate testing to get the finest solution for your visitors. If you have many remedies to a particular problem but uncertain of which one applies best to your product, you can utilize A/B testing to confirm it. You can then compare users’ response in one scenario against another and see which design works best.

The Re-Design Trap

Eventually don’t fall into the complete re-design trap. All too often web designers recommend the total overhaul of a website in the notion that it will lead to a more successful web experience.

eBay’s redesign disaster should be a great reminder of why users react strongly to drastic and huge changes. A dramatic redesign that offers extremely different visuals and an interaction layout might be overwhelming and produce a negative impact.

Rather than investing in a large scale redesign project, our web design team proposes focusing on subtle improvements. Make baby steps- progressive changes that can enhance conversions over time without users having to feel ambushed.

Wrapping Up

These days a huge chunk of marketing is done online. And amid all the activities you pursue online is your website. The fundamental concepts we’ve mentioned above are what will set your website apart from mediocre ones.

In any case, whether it’s creating a CRM, setting up a live chat or ensuring your website is speedy, secure and cross-browser enabled, Stack Mode will certify that you have a winning website.

Book your free consultation today!

Establishing a solid web presence is essential for sustainable business growth. Today’s consumers browse the internet for products and services. Hence, if you want your services availed, if you want your products bought, and if you want your brand recognized, then developing a website can make those things happen! It should no longer be a question why web development is essential, but still, here are some of the best reasons for how web development can be a decisive business advantage!

Adapting to Trends

Having a website for business should no longer be an option but a requirement! Paper advertisements are becoming obsolete, and people have recently been more inclined to online shopping. In fact, according to some surveys, in the year 2020, eighty to ninety percent of consumers across the globe shopped online. The 21st-century people’s digital lifestyle and desire for instant and convenient things require businesses to adapt by investing in digital marketing. People aren’t interested in services and products that are not relevant, and staying up to date with the latest digital marketing technologies ensures that you adapt to today’s latest trends. The technology market is fluid and very dynamic, and it pays to upgrade and develop your website now and then.

Visibility and Accessibility

The easiest way to reach potential consumers is through the internet! Investing in website development helps your business website increase its visibility by attracting more web traffic in and out. Having a website and developing it to provide user-friendly features and 24/7 service increases its accessibility, which is a massive advantage for your business! Even if your physical store is closed for the night, for weekends, or holidays, customers can still browse your website for products and ask questions through chatbots or FAQs. This is also beneficial if you have customers who are more active on the internet at night. Don’t limit your business opportunities by distance! Enjoy a wider audience reach and gain customers even from different parts of the world.

Brand Promotion and Recognition

If you’re a newly established business, it is imperative to let people know about you. How will you gain customers if people didn’t know you exist? You want to let your potential customers all about you. Who are you? How are you doing? How can you help them? After establishing a website, get a web developer that will design your website in a way that showcases your business’ personality and advocacy that would resonate with your audience’s values.

Low Cost, High Yield

Establishing, developing, managing, and maintaining a website is inexpensive! The search engines where you place your website do not charge you a “website placement fee.” Your costs will be more focused on hiring a professional web development company or purchasing some software or adding another person on the payroll assigned with web development. You don’t even have to spend a lot on ads! By properly structuring and optimizing content, you can save a lot during web development and still get as much traffic and conversions as you would if you were to put ads. It also saves you time and resources. Say, for example, you’re a real estate company; if transactions are made online, then your agents do not have to spend money to talk to potential customers physically. Investing in web development, in the long run, will cut your costs in other areas.

Increasing Conversions and Sales

Your website can be your leading digital marketing platform. People will buy your product depending on their overall experience with your website. Stay tuned with the most recent technologies and implement them on your website. The most updated and most user-friendly websites gain the most conversions and sales. What do online consumers expect from a good website? They need relevant content, seamless navigation, and 24/7 assistance with their queries. Aesthetic web design is also important as people can make purchase decisions based on colors alone!

Stay Competitive

Most businesses have websites, and most of them are investing in regular web development. Your competitors are likely doing it too, so you should too! Part of the reason people adapt to trends is to stay relevant. Having a well-developed website can also improve your credibility and reliability, something that you need if you want to convince your consumers to trust you.

Everyone should agree that having a website and developing it for digital marketing is essential for business. It shouldn’t even be questioned at all! By investing in website development, you adapt to the digital lifestyle trend and stay on top of your game. Establishing and developing a website helps you reach a wider audience resulting in increased conversions and sales without spending too much money or wasted effort on other forms of marketing. Finally, developing a website also means growing your business overall.

Speaking of website optimization, there is a great deal you can do to get more traffic, boost your sales and be at the top of your game. Therefore, learning how to optimize your website is important for your site’s long-term success. It will warrant that your website is working as powerfully as it should.

We would hate for you to miss out on awesome website optimization techniques and simple tweaks that can make a distinction between 5 website views and 50,000 website views.

Remember that the internet is a dynamic industry to work in and as website runners and online businesses, we face the risk of lagging. That said, we will specify ten website optimization tricks and tips you should definitely try to keep you ahead of your competition.

What is Website Optimization?

Website optimization is how you enhance your website so that it works successfully. It encompasses all the marketing and technical strategies to get more traffic, interact with visitors and turn them into your clients using a properly structured method that meets your predefined goals.

There are so many constituent categories of website optimization and in reality; the concept is so massive that it encircles many professions and skills needed to take the necessary corrective and website optimization efforts.

From web design to development and from SEO to display speed, website optimization takes a three-step approach namely Search Engine Optimization (SEO), optimization technical performance and optimizing conversion and user experience.

Simply put, you can’t get traffic if it is unqualified and if your web designer cannot convert it. On the other hand, a technically optimized site will be irrelevant if it doesn’t get qualified traffic.

How to Optimize Your Website in 10 Easy Steps

1. Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

SEO should be at the top of your investment list if you want to raise traffic to your site. There are millions of other websites to compete with and you have to work hard to be the best of the best.

One way to remain a step ahead of the competition is by getting clued on the best SEO tools and techniques.

Hence, when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines:

• Do your keyword search homework.
• Correct broken links.
• Decrease bounce rate.
• Include sitemap.
• Boost page speed.
• Ensure your pages consist of at least 2000 words.
• Acquire more back links.

SEO isn’t only about kick-ass content but also about the user-friendliness of your website. It makes perfect sense, the more sophisticated your website is, the more Google desires to link you.

2. Provide Exemplary Customer Delivery

Great customer service pays off in numerous ways. First, if your client delivery is commendable, customers will buy more of your products and recommend your services to others.

Second, customers are less likely to cancel requests or ask for refunds if they have nothing to complain about.

Third, amazing customer service increases your conversion rate. For example, if a client has to inquire about your services, they’ll want to reach out to you and expect an immediate response, not wait for days. Given two options, more clients prefer purchasing from a company with live support.

Stack Mode Marketing Group offers live chat, email support and round on the clock messaging services. We offer web design services that ensure you are happy 24/7!

3. Decrease Your Website Bounce Rate

Your website bounce rate is the rate of visitors who quit your website without viewing more than one page. The more curtailed your bounce rate, the better for your site.

The following are more of our picks to help get you started:

• Ensure readability.
• Foster website speed.
• Improve your posts’ featured images.
• Update your content.
• Reduce adverts.
• Interlink blog posts.
• Assess various anchor text for website navigation.
• Include related or prominent posts at the bottom of your articles.
• Rearrange posts on the category page section to display the most viewed.

Improving your bounce rate will also greatly aid your SEO.

4. Improve Your Website Speed

Increasing your website speed will have a positive impact on search engine ratings and conversions.

Funny enough, so many people create new pages and posts every day without thinking twice about how their site is functioning in speed. This is a serious issue and it is very important we help you tackle it if your website is running at a snail’s pace.

Sure enough many of you have dealt with websites that took ages to load before only to give up and search for another website. If you’ve clicked the ‘back’ button on a website before, what makes you think that your visitors won’t follow suit if your site is super slow?

Remember, Stack Mode isn’t only a web design company but we also offer a wide range of other services including getting to the root cause of a slow running website and helping it to run faster.

5. Update Your Website Frequently

Consistently upgrading your website will greatly enhance your search engine rankings, increase your conversions and lessen your bounce rate.

Only a small percentage of visitors will be interested in reading content that was relevant in the 1990s. No one wants to buy an outdated product either.

Visitors that come to your site want to be convinced that your website is the best and it is worth looking into. So make it worth their while.

Below are a few tips to keep in mind when updating your website:

• Create fresh blog content.
• Indicate dates in posts.
• Repair broken links.
• Copyright date.
• Upgrade social media accounts.

6. Conduct a Split Test on Your Conversion-Generating Pages

Because split testing is mostly reserved for advanced bloggers and website owners, this topic can overwhelm newbies, leaving them confused in a pool of supposedly helpful information. So we will explain in the simplest way possible because we want you to succeed.

Split testing is much like conducting a controlled experiment to improve a website metric such as form completions, purchases or clicks. Split testing is often used to evaluate changes to registration pages, signup forms calls to action and any other website component where a quantifiable goal can be fostered.

You can change nearly every element within your web pages for a split test including:

• Layout: the setup and size of buttons, forms and menus.
• Visual elements such as colors, pictures and videos.
• Text: descriptions, headlines and calls to action.
• Visitor flow: how a visitor interacts with your pages.

Here are a few simple split testing practices to begin with:

• Home in on the call to action: This text conforms differently to the type of audience.
• Removing some page elements: Fewer elements offer fewer distractions from the conversion intention.
• Offer symmetric and coherent experiences: Create steady test changes throughout the user flow to enhance conversions at each stage of the process.

So what does split testing accomplish? It helps you assess conflicting opinions and your site visitors will indirectly guide your final choice on the best design.

7. Track and Analyze Your Traffic

Again this is something a lot of website owners take for granted or fail to understand its essence. Tracking and analyzing can open doors for your website or blog in surplus ways, all of which earn you a huge deal of income.

Do you know how many times visitors click on your website’s pages? Which is the most clicked page? How long does the average user of your website access your content? If you have no clue how to answer these questions, then how can you know the direction your business is heading and most importantly where are you going wrong?

Tracking and analyzing your website gives you a clue on what you are doing wrong thus changing your strategy until the problem is resolved.

Google Analytics offers a plethora of benefits when it comes to setting up goals to measure and improve your website performance. These goals are your website conversions in the form of email signups, sales, video watching, leads and more. You can then measure how effective your online marketing is using these goals and whether you are getting a return on any advertising incurred.

8. Polish Up Your Website Filter

You may be tempted to create an intricate website thinking it looks sophisticated but no one wants to wander through a website like a treasure hunt game where they have to keep guessing and searching for clues.

When a user visits your website, you want to guide them through an incredible tour that prompts them to effortlessly click from one page to another.

Here is an example of what we mean:

Home page -> Learn about us -> Services page -> Solutions page -> Blog post -> Related blog post -> Contact page.

The goal is to get your visitors to engage with your website without leaving. It is important to scheme out how you want your visitors to maneuver through your website and ensure that every page is optimized for what you want to achieve.

9. Have a Killer Website Design

A huge chunk of website optimization comes from improving your web design. It is right next to SEO. Though SEO does most of the work by bringing traffic to your site, the design is equally important.

Just imagine clicking on a top-listed result on Google for one of your searches only to find out that the web layout is unappealing! You immediately click the ‘back’ button and search for something else.

If you suspect that your visitors are doing the same, you can always reach out to us and we will assign you to our five-star web designer who will revamp your website from top to bottom. You must try to stand out from the crowd with a breathtaking web design that makes you the shepherd rather than the sheep.

10. Revise Your Website Content

Truly content is king! Remember that creating articles isn’t just about churning post after post. It is about solving issues that people have or offering ways to meet their needs, inspiring them or showing them stumbling blocks they can avoid.

Awesome website content should appeal to the crowd, whether it will involve adding some images, videos or audio files on your posts.

However, sometimes fresh blog ideas are hard to come by no matter how hard you crack your head. It’s not that you’ve lost your touch or that you care any less about your website but we all run out of things to say at times.

If you hit rock bottom, the best web design company in Reno, Stack Mode gladly steps in to remedy this situation. Our creative content creators can help you write eye-catching content that will keep your visitors hitting the ‘click’ button.

Summary

These are 10 actionable tips to help you get the most out of your website. We certainly hope these tips will help you massively increase your website traffic.

Let us know which website optimization tip(s) made a tremendous impact on your site. And if you have other honorary mentions we are more than happy to hear them.

Call on Stack Mode Marketing Group for the ultimate website optimization and any other web design services.

Go big or go home- that’s our motto!