When it comes to optimizing your business website, there are many aspects that need to be taken care of. First off, it’s the general user experience (UX) and usability. Your site needs to be intuitive and easy to use. Secondly, your site needs to be consistent with the latest SEO standards, which also partially have to do with UX, but also a whole host of other things that go beyond “keywords.”

The truth is that even if you’ve invested a considerable amount of money into an appealing design, that doesn’t guarantee visibility and traffic. In this article, we’ve compiled a set of essential things you need to take care of so that your business website attracts greater traffic and generate more sales. Let’s take a look, shall we?

 

User experience matters

While most of us aren’t versed on the issues that have to do with design, we can still apply some basic user experience principles to our site’s layout that will considerably improve the way our customers will interact with it.

1. Whitespace

The first thing you can very quickly improve in your site is let it breathe a little, and by that, I mean to create some more space between the elements on your pages. Why is that important? Whitespace improves readability.

 

When text and images and all cramped up on your site pages, it dissuades users from interacting with the content.

Here’s a classic example of a site that has little to no whitespace, it’s commonly used as a scarecrow for beginner designers.

 

Spacing your content will remove the “friction” between your content and the users interacting with it.

 

2. CTA’s (calls to action)

It’s imperative to experiment and optimize your CTA’s. Ultimately, it depends on what particular action you’re optimizing for. For example, if you’re looking to optimize your site for higher sales, it’s essential to regularly A/B test your button color, position, and text.

For example, if you’re looking to increase sales, it’s essential to use colors that are enticing to the human psyche, like blue, green, and red. It’s also commonly considered that the best position for buttons is on the right, rather than the left. However, there are exceptions to this rule.

 

3. Optimizing the content you publish

Obviously, you need to ensure that the content that goes out on your corporate blog is of high quality, but it’s not exactly what we’re going to touch on here.

Your text needs to be adequately spaced so that it isn’t hard to read. This is pretty much the same principle as whitespace. Think of a landing page, every single string of text you publish on it has to “make sense,” there shouldn’t be any excess elements on it. You want the text to be read with ease. A dense block of text will simply ensure that your audience will refrain from reading it.

Businesses often delegate content creation to professional writers services that know all the ins and outs of how articles and landing copies should be structured and positioned to convert and rank better.

 

Here’s an example:

 

Here is a list of things you need to take care of:

• Carefully select the most suitable font for your website. Make sure it reflects your business’s personality but also ensure readability.
• Don’t overuse intense colors and eccentric fonts. Make sure you use them strategically, mostly for CTA’s.
• Make your paragraphs sweet and short. Refrain from writing paragraphs longer than 4 sentences.
• To allow your audience to skim the article and extract maximum value from your article — make use of bulleted and numbered lists.
• Enforce an information hierarchy. Break your content down into headings that range from H1 to H3. This will allow your audience to map your content conceptually and will enable search engines to index your data effectively.

 

 

4. Add an SSL certificate

Simply implementing an SSL certificate to your business webpage will considerably change the way your site is perceived by your clientele. Say if you’re selling something directly on your website, your customers will be certain that your site is safe to use and their financial and personal information will not be misused.

And this isn’t just mere speculation. There have been a few case studies that confirm the beneficial effects of an SSL certificate on overall sales.

Here are a few examples:

• The Central Reservation Service has written about the fact that an SSL badge associated with their site has grown their sales and conversion rates by 30 percent.
• Symantec has also published a report stating that once the SSL certificate badge has been added to their site, their conversions have increased by up to 87 percent, depending on the page and service offered.

 

 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Matters

Another critical aspect that needs to be taken care of is SEO. You can’t expect to get many sales out of your website without ranking high in the search results on the major search engines. Some aspects of SEO optimization intersect with UX optimization. Let’s look into some things you can improve in your SEO strategy to increase sales:

 

1. Take care of keywords

Keywords aren’t by far as important in SEO as they were seven years ago, but that doesn’t mean that they can be ignored. They still play a central role in ranking. If you don’t optimize for keywords, your customers might find it complicated to find you on the web.

Imagine you’re a music hardware vendor. You obviously want to rank high on the most evident and straightforward keywords in your niche, like “best music hardware” or “high-quality synthesizers,” and so forth. However, there is a wide range of other keywords that your clientele may use to find websites like yours to purchase hardware. It is your responsibility to identify those and start scrupulously implementing them in your:

• Content
• Pages
• URLs
• Headings
• Image descriptions
• Metadata
• Page titles

 

2. Create high-quality content

At the same time, it’s important to underline that an excellent keyword strategy is pretty much pointless without awesome content. Stellar content is what sets you apart from your competition. While it doesn’t sell anything per se, it creates an image for your customers. An image of a trustworthy company that knows what it’s doing. Furthermore, good content is eagerly shared, which seriously increases your reach, which, in effect, increases your sales.

 

3. Learn about on-page SEO

On-page SEO is a more technical facet of website optimization, but which can nevertheless be executed by a person that isn’t exactly versed in the field. On-page optimization is designed to make the information on your site easier to index, thus helping your webpage rank higher in Google search results.

Here are a few basic things that you need to work on, in order to make sure that your on-page optimization is on point:

• Write detailed title tags
• Optimize the file sizes of the elements on your page to decrease the time it takes to load your page
• Write detailed keyword-optimized alt text for the graphic elements and images on your website
• Facilitate the user’s navigation throughout the site with internal links and have a healthy external and internal link ratio
• Avoid cryptic URL’s

4. Improving readability

Readability can be calculated. There are a few standard readability equations that can establish how easy it is to go through your text and how intelligible it is to an eighth-grader. However, even if your audience comprises exclusively of academics that shouldn’t incentivize you to write impenetrable material.

Publishing easy-to-digest content to your business website will allow you to better connect with your audience whether they’re amateurs in your field or professionals.

Let’s say you’re the same music hardware company we spoke of previously. Music production gear is known to be packed with impenetrable terminology. By writing cryptic text and product descriptions, you’re demotivating your less experienced potential customer from purchasing your products.

 

Conclusion

We hope you found these business website optimization tips useful. Once you make the necessary changes to your business page, you’ll surely see an increase in overall traffic, along with a more significant percentage of converted customers.