Is Your Website Everything Your Customers Are Looking For?
In any business, the website is always going to be one of the most important parts of the operation. As long as you get this right, it is generally going to mean that you have much happier customers, who are much more likely to want to stick around and give you their custom. So the question is, what are some of the qualities that your customers are likely to look for in a website, and how can you ensure you are providing them as best as you can?
In this post, we’ll discuss some of the main qualities, features and so on that you will need to include in your website if it is going to be as good for customers as possible. If you can get this right, you should find it makes a world of difference.
Branded Appropriately
You might think of branding as something that is important for the business itself, in terms of marketing, and generally that’s right. However, it also helps the customers, because it ensures that they know they are in the right place when they come across it, and that is obviously a really important thing too. So you will certainly want to try and make sure that you have branded your website appropriately, otherwise people won’t necessarily know that they are in the right place.
That’s a simple enough thing to achieve, luckily. Mostly, it’s just about getting the color scheme right, and ensuring that the website’s URL matches the brand or business name – as well as the tagline and the banner at the top, too. If you have thought about those kinds of details, you should be able to expect your website to be much more effective, so it’s definitely something to think about.
Once the branding is as it should be, your customers are already going to feel that they are getting a lot more from the website, so this is absolutely the kind of thing that you should bear in mind.
Ease Of Use
As with most things that your customers will be in contact with, you also want to make sure that your website is as easy to use as possible. This might actually be quite simple to ensure as long as you focus on a couple of main things. First of all, you’ll certainly want to consider how easy it is to navigate to the site initially, as it’s surprising in how many ways this can be interrupted. After you have done that, you might want to check that each and every page is working as it should, loading properly and so on.
If there are any apparent bugs here, then you might want to check with your technical team, or work on it yourself if you think you have the necessary knowhow. Either way, it’s going to be the kind of thing that really helps the site to improve.
As long as you have strong ease of use across the website as a whole, that’s going to mean that your customers are considerably more likely to enjoy it, and to get what they need out of it, so this is a really important thing to bear in mind.
Help & Assistance
In general, one of the main and most common things that customers will be seeking from a visit to your site is some help and assistance. It’s therefore important that you are offering this in spades, and it’s something that can be relatively straightforward for you to get right. There are many kinds of help and assistance that your customers might be looking to get, and it’s vital that you can provide them all.
One simple way to help with this is to ensure that all relevant information is easy to find, because that’s the main thing that they are going to look out for. That would probably include your contact details and a contact form, for example. Once you’ve done that, you might want to think about some of the other kinds of help that they might want. For instance, they might be keen to speak to someone about an issue, or possibly even to complain, and it’s going to prove essential that you have something in place that they can make use of for this.
That’s why it’s always a great idea to build a chatbot for your website that people can make use of. Done right, chatbots can be a really effective way to make sure that your customers are able to communicate with you, and it’s amazing how easy these actually are to set up these days too. So all in all, that’s the kind of thing that you are certainly going to want to think about.
If they can get the help and assistance they need from your website, that’s one of the best things that could be said for it, and you’ll find that they are going to be really happy about that overall.
Products
Depending on the nature of your business, you may or may not have products listed on the website itself. But if you do, then it’s something you will need to get right, to ensure that your customers are able to find what they need, and that the experience is going to be as generally positive as can be. So what are some of the things you might want to consider here?
One of the main ones is availability and visibility. Basically, you need to make sure that your products are easily found, that you have what people are looking for in stock as much as possible, and that you are generally going to provide what they want. If you can set up a complete marketplace on your site, that’s one of the best things you can do for them and for your business as well, so it’s definitely something you’ll want to consider.
Make sure that you only do this if it is necessary for your business model, however. If it is, it could be great.
Something Personal
It can really help relations with your customers if you use the website to show a little something of yourself. This can be easier to do convincingly if your business is on the smaller side, but it’s perfectly possible either way, so you should definitely think about this if you are trying to bring your customers in as much as you can. This personal thing can be a lot of different things, but one of the best options is to simply make sure that you are showcasing who you are.
That can be achieved with a simple, tried-and-tested About Us page, and if you want to give the best effect you may want to consider having some photographs of the people in your top team at least. This can be a hugely effective way to get people involved, and it helps customers to think that they are engaging with a business they are really happy to support. So all in all, it’s going to be absolutely worth your while spending some time on this kind of page.
Plus, it’s just one of those common features that people generally want to see on a website, and you will probably find that you are going to be glad for yourself too.
A Blog
You may already be aware that a blog is one of the most important features you can have on your website for SEO reasons. It provides you with an easy way to put up frequent updates of content, and it ensures that you are going to have the search engines crawling through the site more often, thus improving your ranking chances. However, it’s also something that customers want to see, and that’s especially true if you actually make use of it as a way to provide useful information to your customers and other people.
So consider setting up a blog and creating some scheduled posts for it. The posts can relate to that which is directly relevant to your business, as well as stuff which might be only tangentially related from time to time too. In any case, you’ll find that having a blog really does help the site to feel complete, and it’s something that customers will be glad to see.
Social Links
Most people also want to see links to your social media feeds, and this is something that is really quick and easy to include. You can even have a live link that updates on the site itself automatically, if you like, although these are somewhat going out of fashion now. In any case, having some strong social links on your website is definitely going to help ensure that you are keeping your site as good as possible.
Those are just some of the main things you can ensure that your website has, to make it more popular and to ensure that your customers feel it is providing what they need and want.
