Elements Your Website Needs to Rank

We find it hard to believe, but about one-third of the nation’s small businesses still do not have a website. Hard to believe because so much of today’s business activity is Internet-driven. Consider first that more than 90% of consumers research products and services on the Internet from websites that rank before making a purchase. This suggests that absent a website, your business may have slashed its potential customer base by 90%.

Also consider that in today’s digitally driven world, the lack of a website could diminish the credibility of your business. Many consumers see a company without an online presence to be stuck in the last century. Unless they’re searching for antiques, they might be hesitant about doing business with a company operating under old-school methods. Other reasons having a website is crucial in today’s business climate include:

• Clearly showcases your brand.
• Instrumental in generating leads.
• Enhances customer service.
• Boosts marketing capabilities.
• Serves as a digital brochure.
• Provides ease in customer outreach and operational updates.
• Organically increases the potential customer base.
• Allows you to compete with similar businesses.
• Ensures business survival during pandemics and similar emergency situations.

Basic Elements of Your Business’ Website

If your business has a website, or you’re planning to set one up, you should devote some resources to ensure the promotion of its presence, or rank, on the Internet. In particular, you will want your website to be easily found and accessed. This involves using search engine optimization (SEO) to boost the likelihood of your website appearing on search engine results pages (SERP). Surprisingly, up to 50% of businesses fail to actively engage in SEO and other digital marketing efforts. This suggests that you can get a leg up on the competition while enhancing your website presence with a proactive digital marketing effort. For more details on SERP and SEO, check out our recent blog post, “What is SEO, and How is it Related to the Importance of SERP.”

Internal and external features of your website will drive the success of your website as a business tool. Start with the basic site architecture, which supports what visitors to your website experience. Your home page should clearly and efficiently express your company’s purpose and what it offers the visiting consumer. Visitors should be able to navigate through the site with ease. Whether it is to find additional information, make a purchase, or communicate with you. Needless to say, everything on the website needs to make sense and should be pertinent to your business. Extraneous information, or graphics, photos, videos, and other media placed solely for the sake of art only serve as distractions.

Key Elements of Your Website That Will Drive its Success

Once you have the basic website architecture and content down, you can focus on critical elements to drive its success; higher rank and boosting its visibility on the crowded Internet field. Search engine algorithms examine and score 100s of different factors. This helps determine a website’s placement in search results. Still, a half-dozen or so are the primary drivers of search engine recognition.

They include:

• High Quality and Compelling Content—All content must be well-written and clearly express meaning and intent. If a reader can’t easily understand website text, an algorithm probably won’t be able to either.
• Page Load Speed— This internal website architecture element has emerged as a top SEO ranking factor in recent years. Not only do algorithms downgrade sites with slow speeds, but delays in page loading cause potential customers to move on.
• Mobile Friendliness—Mobile devices now conduct more searches than desktop computers, which means search engine algorithms essentially upgrade mobile-friendly websites.
• Optimized Keywords—Keywords are relatively simple and have long been a primary ranking factor. If you run an auto repair shop, the word-chain “auto repair shop” should figure predominantly. Algorithms also think locally, so such keyword chains should also express where you are.
• On-Page Optimization—This refers to internal elements of website architecture that help algorithms better understand your business and who might be most interested in it. On-page optimization, which seems to be a misnomer, includes metadata, schema, featured snippets, and other information that is only seen by the algorithms.
• Internal and External Links—Algorithms look favorably upon links between your website’s pages and reportedly give huge upgrades to websites linked to authoritative sources—that is, other websites that have big audiences and rank highly.
• An accessible and secure website—Your website must be accessible for a search engine to rank it. This means that your web pages need to be constructed with good code that also provides some measure of website security.

Instead of DIY Website Creation and Rank Testing, Turn to Moxxi Marketing

You can build your own business website by signing up with any number of content management system companies that provide online website creation and publishing. While these companies offer DIYers everything needed to design, create, and publish a website, you will likely expend significant resources to navigate the process needed to create the website. Optimization will require even more of your valuable time.

To make it easier on yourself, you can turn the job over to a professional website design company, such as Moxxi Marketing. Not only do we create powerful, aesthetically pleasing websites, but we also infuse them with the best in SEO and other digital marketing components to rank the site. To learn more, consult with Moxxi Marketing by contacting us today at 239.330.6236.