Revenue Decreasing: 5 Crucial Elements your Website might be Missing
Having your own website is a crucial instrument for many businesses and enterprises, whether it’s purpose is as a store, a place for customer interfacing or even merely for self-promotion. What business owners don’t realize is that some key elements of your site can be easily overlooked.
1. Email sign up Tool
An email sign up area is particularly important if you run an online store or service, as a newsletter email can be a great way of reaching out to new and existing customers who join looking for updates and notifications of special offers such as sale periods and discount events. With this being said, you would be astonished at how many websites don’t feature an email sign up feature on their homepage. You can easily get yourself a free mail signup form or pop up from a provider such as MailChimp, which allows you to copy/paste the pre-written HTML directly into your site’s coding.
2. Quality Images
Obviously, no engaging website would be complete without some imagery, but what many sites struggle with is obtaining good-quality and relevant images for free. Outside of the usual cheesy copyright-free image offerings available on conventional stock photo websites, there are a number of niche royalty-free photo sites that offer something a bit less generic. Websites such as Negative Space and (the aptly named) Death to the Stock Photo specialize in high-caliber looking imagery that give your site a more professional appearance.
Furthermore, the platform you choose to build your website also counts as a factor in the quality of the overall look and appearance of the pages. These packages are better than a free website builder, because the latter doesn’t include extras such as photo libraries, whereas a paid option from a reputable provider does. It’s usually better to try a paid website package that includes a 30-day money back guarantee and discover for yourself if the advantages of paid hosting over free web builders are worth it.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Every website needs the basic optimization to help it stand out and be picked up in relevant search engine results such as metadata and title/heading tags, but many website owners are unaware of how to achieve this in order to reap the results of a higher ranking appearance on major search engines like Google and a greater amount of traffic through their site. The basic principles of SEO are fully outlined in this comprehensive guide by Moz.
It may astonish you to hear that after Google, YouTube ranks as the second biggest search engine in the world, so for those with an already established understanding of SEO knowhow, it would be wise to take a look at our top tips for optimizing your YouTube videos, also.
4. Social Media Links
Remember to link to your associated social media accounts to take full advantage of your site’s traffic and following. The social buttons (such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.) are a fixture on just about every page on the web nowadays and enable customers and visitors to share content that will potentially attract more visitors to your site.
5. New Posts
A steady flow of fresh content is absolutely critical to ensuring the validity of any website. Regularly adding content shows search engine bots that you are an active and contributing member of the internet and not another one of the millions of abandoned sites that lay scattered all over the web. The mistake many website owners make is to leave their sites stagnant for weeks or days at a time, so be sure to switch things up as often as possible- whether this is text, images, links or embedded videos.