If you’re a small business owner or you’re just starting out, you will find it hard to part with lots of money when creating and maintaining your website. And you might wonder how you are going to help your website increase its revenue.
Thanks to the invention of drag and drop website builders, actually getting your site off the ground is now quick and simple.
But once you’ve created your site, how can you maximize the profit you earn from it? If you follow the four (pretty simple) steps outlined below, you should see an increase in the revenue from your site. And you will see it purely as a result of investing your time without you having to break the bank!
1. The Demise of Desktop
Mobile responsiveness ensures that people have an enjoyable and seamless experience on your site. This should be the case for people using any type of device, whether desktop, phone, or tablet.
Not only does having a mobile responsive site work in your favor with Google but it also benefits your customers and, therefore, your bottom line.
Forty percent of online users will choose a different site if their first choice is not mobile friendly. Yet despite this fact, 91% of small businesses don’t have a mobile responsive website. Don’t make this mistake!
Making your website mobile friendly doesn’t have to be a complex task, even if it sounds daunting. In fact, many drag and drop website builders incorporate mobile responsiveness as a standard feature.
Although potentially time-consuming, the investment really is worth it. Without a mobile site, you are at risk of losing 40% of your client base.
2. The Gospel According to Google
Getting your website to rank highly in the search results will increase the visibility of your business to your customers and drive much more traffic to your site.
For your site to have a high ranking, you will need to think about your on-page optimization and use some basic SEO tricks.
Make sure you are optimizing for keywords and that your site is using appropriate, engaging, and informative images and/or videos.
Use relevant outbound and internal links to aid site navigation and give readers options to read more on a topic. Good links will help your page to rank. The more useful a page is, the better Google will view it.
Page loading speed is integral because Google also looks favorably on quick loading sites. So you can climb in the rankings just by having a faster load time.
Also, the faster it loads, the more receptive users are likely to be to your site. You don’t want to start off on the wrong foot with a bad first impression.
You should aim for a 2 second load time. If you can get your load time as low as 1.7 seconds, you’ll be faster than 75% of the internet!
Secondly, do some competitor analysis. Check out the competition, see what they’re doing, and set about doing it better.
Making a website that is far ahead of your competitors can be a really effective way of gaining traffic and increasing site revenue. The reason why is you will be redirecting potential customers away from your competition and towards your newly optimized site.
Another great way to gain traffic is through social media, a factor Google views as an increasingly important indicator of a high quality site.
Consistently share engaging content across a range of different channels (not forgetting about the potential of LinkedIn for B2B audiences).
If you do so, you are increasing the visibility of your site and your business as a whole. You will build brand awareness and eventually drive more traffic to your site, thus helping to boost that bottom line.
3. Put Yourself in Their Shoes
You need to consider how customers experience your site and the ease with which they can move through it to achieve their desired outcomes.
The user experience can greatly affect how many potential customers actually complete a purchase. Once you’ve come to grips with the SEO factors mentioned above, you’ll be getting many users to your page.
But once they are there, you’ve got to capture their attention and help them along the buying process in order to get that all-important conversion. This is where the user journey comes into play.
You need to make sure you really understand your customers, that is, their behavior, thoughts, and feelings. So market research is paramount.
Once you understand more about your range of customers, you can tailor the user experience to different users at various stages in the conversion funnel.
One really helpful way of visualizing different user journeys is to construct a customer journey map that you can adjust, tweak, and improve.
Having this map will ensure that the customers visiting your site are experiencing it in the best way possible. You ultimately want them to convert easily, increasing that all-important revenue.
Two top tips for the user journey:
- Make sure your call-to-action is engaging, inviting and, most importantly, prominent.
- Think about the number of clicks the user has to perform in order to convert—the fewer the better!
4. Keep Them Wanting More
Having perfected the user journey, you will have happy customers. They might even be likely to buy another one of your products or return to your site for a repeat purchase.
If you capitalize on this user satisfaction, you are very likely to see site revenue rocket. Customers will convert on products and services they didn’t realise they needed before your site came along!
You could help your revenue increase by adding “related products” or “customers also bought” sections to each product page.
Displaying any current deals or promotions also works wonders for cross-selling and can be a great way to boost the profitability of your site.
You could give email marketing a try and offer other products that way. Email marketing is the third most influential source of information for B2B audiences (with colleague recommendations and industry thought-leaders taking the top spots).
Eighty percent of retail professionals indicate that email marketing is their most effective strategy for customer retention. Use the customer information you have collected from your website and leverage it to drive repeat business.
You Can Help Your Website Do More
The value of having a website is no longer in question. But the amount of value a website can add to your business does depend on how you design it and how you leverage its potential.
Following these four simple steps will make your website both user and Google friendly, thus maximizing your chances of boosting that all-important bottom line.