Attraction of customers is the target that any successful business organization is tailored to meet and the more successful a business is, the more it is customer oriented. Regardless what kind of business you’re running, it takes a strong online presence and willingness. In the last decade or so in particular, many consumers have become accustomed to finding what they want online.

According to a Salesforce survey, 85% of consumers conduct research before they make a purchase online, and among the most used channels for research are websites (74%) and social media (38%). Consequently, businesses need to have an effective online strategy to increase brand awareness and grow. With the right techniques, you can significantly increase traffic to your online store and get the sales you need for lasting success.

Award-winning Author and Entrepreneur, Rieva Lesonsky suggests that Discounts, Referrals, Networking and having a Website are great ways to attract clients but which tactics will have the greatest impact?

Your Website

Websites are becoming more and more interactive. Their ease of use plays an integral part in engaging potential customers and ensuring its usability and features that ensure quick closeup is effective.

Your website is an incredible asset that allows consumers to find you and hopefully it inspires them to convert. A clean, modern design can visually connect with consumers by exemplifying your personality and brand voice. Moreover, a site that is intentionally designed for an enhanced user experience can make a powerful first impression on consumers. 

Goran Paun, Forbes Councils Member

For each page you’re creating you should ask yourself:

• What purpose does this page serve?
• What do users want/need to know about this topic?
• What types of content are necessary to convey our message as effectively as possible?

The answers to these questions should be used to inform the design of the site because the design of it must be conceived to accommodate the content you’ve deemed necessary.

Blogs-SEO

After setting up your website, it is highly encouraged to create a Blog. As reported by Hubspot, blogging drives website traffic and promote your products and services, and also helps you build trust with your potential customers. In fact, it’s a fantastic way to personalize and humanize your brand by imparting your brand values to your readers.

There’s no point having a blog with lots of interesting content if your post can’t reach your consumers. As a bonus, blogging can also help boost SEO by showing search engine bots that you’re an authority in the industry your small business is in. Using the right Keywords and Hashtags ensure you rank high on search engines such as Google so that people can reach your post whenever they search for a term associated with your niche.

How They Connect

Very often, people are redirected from your blog post and social media channels to your websites homepage and it’s key to note that just as a reception desk is a place that decides about the first impression of people visiting your company office and homepage is such a reception desk of your website.

Studies have shown that 38.5% of users judge a business by how their website looks at first glance. When working on your homepage, remember that it should meet the expectations of users, not solely yours. At the same time, it shouldn’t be overloaded with content. Too many links and texts can make visitors feel lost. Users should be able to access the necessary information as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they may decide to leave your page.

It’s very important that you take time in building your websites because this can improve your brand recognition, attract visitors and turn them into customers/ clients. Consider the following;

1. Mobile-friendly Design: 

The most popular device used to conduct internet searches and to browse websites is the mobile phone. We live in a mobile-first age. Sites optimized for search engines should give equal consideration to the mobile layouts of their websites (rather than just bolting on simple responsive website design). To create a truly mobile-friendly design and maximize results from mobile search, you must think of the needs and wants of mobile users. What a user will do on a phone is often far different from what they will do on a computer. And even if your conversions tend to be on a desktop, that crucial first touch may well be on mobile.

It is worth noting that mobile-friendliness is a confirmed ranking factor for mobile search, and it is the mobile version of your site that will be used by the search engine to review and rank your site. However, far more important, mobile is how your prospective customers are searching for and browsing your site. The goal of search engines is to provide the best results they possibly can to users who search on their platforms. More Users equals more Advertisers, and more Advertisers equal more Profit. What this means on a practical level is that search engines will reward sites that offer great experiences to users. The last thing they want is to place a site in the first position of the results page and have a user click on that site only to realize that it’s frustrating or difficult to use. Poor usability translates to a bad user experience with the search engine. Good usability translates to user satisfaction with both the website in question and the search engine that included it in the results.

Good user experience will bear itself out in longer time spent on a page/site, higher volumes of inbound links, and a healthy amount of social shares. These factors are seen as indications of quality and therefore are rewarded by search engines. Of course, by now we all know that it’s not enough to focus solely on desktop usability – mobile usability has an equally important role to play in the overall picture of user experience. Mobile-friendliness is an absolute must if you’re hoping to make gains in organic search visibility, and it should be a primary design focus. Web usability is a combination of other factors: device-specific design, page speed, design conventions and an intuitive approach to putting the site together with the end user in mind.

Key factors to consider include:

2. Page Speed

Page speed is a measurement of how fast the content on your page loads. You can evaluate your page speed with Google’s Page Speed Insights.

Key factors to consider include:

3. Content Discoverability

In order for content to be crawled and indexed by search engines, it needs to be discoverable. Search engines, though sophisticated, are limited to discovering content through links. If the proper links to your content don’t exist, or they’re buried or broken, your content won’t be discovered and it will be impossible to get your site’s pages to rank. Your goal from a design perspective is to create a site architecture that is intuitive for users to engage with, while your goal from an SEO perspective is to create an architecture that allows pages to be crawled and distributes internal links judiciously.

Fortunately, these goals are aligned and can be achieved simultaneously. Prioritize your most important content high up in the architecture – this will include top level service or product categories, which should also map directly to your priority keyword themes. From there, create subcategories and individual product or service pages.

4. Site Architecture

Your site structure should be well organized in a way that makes sense and simplifies navigation and discovery.

Key factors to consider include:

• URLs: A sensible naming convention helps provide yet more context for humans and search engines.
• Navigation: This is more than just the menu at the top of your website. It is how you signpost users to the most relevant part of your site. Navigation can be a tool to raise awareness of additional services and includes not just text links but content on all pages and in the templated design elements of your site. Ensure your navigation is crystal-clear — if one user can make a mistake, many others can, too.
• Quality content: The content on your website is what tells search engines what each page is about.

Think of these strategies as a starter list. Add your own ideas. The key is to get started now so that when next year rolls around, you’re already selling to an expanded customer base.