Regardless of your industry and the type of product or service you offer, having a strong digital presence has become a must-have element for growing a business. There are several channels you can explore to engage with your customers online from social media to directories and review sites. Customers can find your business via any of these channels. These channels have one thing in common, they are often linked to your website. When it comes to buying decisions, customers visit your website to learn more about your product or service before they buy. For this reason, your website is your number one real estate online and you need to invest in your website.

If you’re in business and not already investing in your website, you should be if you want to accomplish those business goals you have set for 2023 and beyond. A good website is a business expense that will always pay for itself several times over by acting as a lead funnel and point of sale for your offering.

Still not convinced? Here are 6 reasons why you should invest in your website in 2023.

Why You Should Invest in Your Website:

1. Building Credibility and Trust:

your website is often the first impression customers get of your business. If your website is not professionally developed and up to date with the content relevant to your offering, it might convey the wrong impression to your prospective customers resulting in a missed opportunity for them to take further action to learn about your offering.

2. Reach customers beyond your geographical location:

A good website gives you access to a larger audience and global reach. As you can see, investing in your website is an investment that will reward you over the long term. If you do it right, you’ll be able to reach a larger audience and make more money than ever before.

Having a website is a great way to keep track of your business, stay connected with your customers, and reach out to new ones.

• You can use it to get the word out about things like upcoming events, sales, new products or services, and so on.
• You can make it easier for current customers to find what they’re looking for. This will help you retain them as repeat customers.
• It’s easy for people who aren’t familiar with your business yet to find out more about both by browsing through your site.

3. Source data and insights:

with tools like Google Console and Google analytics, your website can serve as a rich source of data to learn more about your customers. With these tools, you can learn more about where your potential customers are located geographically, what they search for when they are looking for the services you offer, what time of the day they search for your offering, how long they are spending on different pages of your website. These are powerful insights that can help you position your offering better to generate more leads and sales to grow your business.

4. Better customer service

With a well-designed and responsive website, you can provide better customer service to your customer. You can provide;

• 24/7 customer service
• Quick response times to customer queries
• Personalised service for each customer
• Consistent response times

5. Your website is your Best Upper funnel marketing tool:

Without a website, you’re missing out on the opportunity to reach new customers and grow your business. Majority of the customer journey for any product or service starts with a search engine these days. Your website is your best option to ensure you appear on relevant search results when people search for the products or services you offer.

Your website is the best way to communicate with your customers, whether it’s through blog posts about what you offer or an online store where people can easily buy things from you. It also allows potential clients to get information about who you are and what services you provide before they come in person. By the time they come in person, they have already nurtured leads from learning about your offering on your website. This improves the chances of conversion significantly.

6. Increased visibility on Google search

When you search on Google, the results are ranked by several factors. These include quality content, keywords and backlinks. Investing a comprehensive SEO strategy will help you rank better on Google search engine results and generate more organic leads for your business.

Spending time on copywriting to ensure the content on your website is purposeful and speaks directly to the needs of your customers will lead to longer engagement of customers when they visit your website.

Keywords are important because they help people find what they’re looking for online. If every page of your website contains relevant keywords, then Google will know that this is exactly what users want to see when they search a certain phrase and rank you accordingly in its results pages (SERPs).

Backlinks are also vital because these tell Google how trustworthy other sites think your site is – this can influence where it places you in its rankings. You can generate backlinks for your website, by publishing good quality content and using and implementing a content outreach strategy to get other websites with high domain authority to add backlinks to your website.

7. Improve the user experience

Are customers able to easily navigate your website and find what they are looking for?  User experience (UX) is a critical part of the user-customer relationship. UX design is the process of designing a website for easy to use. It’s about designing the user experience, and making things easy for users and customers.

Your users will have a much better experience with your site if they can easily find what they’re looking for on it, and if they don’t need to spend lots of time trying to figure out how things work or what information is available.  To ensure the user experience on your website is optimal and drives a clear call to action for product purchase or subscription to your service.

Through user testing audits, you can test your website with real people who don’t know anything about its features or design before asking them questions about it. You can use this feedback from actual users to identify any problems with the site so that you can fix them before relaunching publicly. You can engage web design agency can help you with these activities. 

8. Optimise your calls to action.

One way to ensure that your audience is getting the most out of their visit is by ensuring that you have clear calls to action (CTA). This means making sure the buttons and other controls are easy to click and that they stand out on the page. If a user has trouble finding what they’re looking for, they’ll likely leave your site.

The more relatable your call to action is to your customer the more they are likely to contact you or buy your product. As a business evolves, the messaging shifts around seasonality or changes in the products or services offered. You should also update your website accordingly to reflect this. a website should not be static, it should be updated regularly to reflect the changes in trends, consumer behaviour and sensualities. From a search engine perspective, Google likes websites that are updated regularly and tends to rank them higher in search results. 

Use colour contrast to highlight your CTA and for the text, be sure that whatever words are used are clear but concise enough to encourage the customer to take the desired action.

9. Simplify the Checkout Process:

If you run an eCommerce online store, your checkout process is critical to successful order completion. Many websites have a high abandoned cart rate because their checkout process is too tasking, and customers abandon the purchase.

How easy is it for customers to complete an order and pay on your website? The checkout process is one of the most important steps in your customer journey. It’s when you get to seal the deal and make sure that your customers are happy with their purchase. Work with your web designer to optimize the user experience on your checkout page to ensure it does not become an obstacle to the successful completion of transactions and sales on your website.

Here are some tips for optimizing your checkout experience:

• Keep the number of form fields to a minimum. Only ask for information that is absolutely necessary to complete the purchase.
• Use autofill and predictive input features to make it easier for customers to fill out forms.
• Optimise the page for purchase on mobile as a lot of customers shop via mobile devices.
• Offer multiple payment options, including popular options like credit cards and PayPal.
• Use a secure connection (https) to protect sensitive information like credit card numbers.
• Clearly communicate the total cost, including taxes and any additional fees, before the customer submits their payment.
• Allow customers to save their information for future purchases to speed up the checkout process.

Conclusion:

Your website is the most important part of your business’s digital presence. Investing in your website in 2023, will help you generate more leads and sales to achieve your business goals. We have provided several tips that, if implemented correctly, will help you convert your website into a powerful marketing tool for your business.

If you have questions about implementing any of the suggestions in this article, please contact us at Fitch Technologies. Our team is available to assist you in updating your website and growing your business online.