You can’t run a modern business without a successful online presence. Most markets are hyper-competitive. Despite that many website owners still neglect important factors like website speed, traffic diversity, and conversion rate. Follow these 5 tips if you want your website to gain value in 2022 and beyond.
Use Conversion Kits
A lot of website owners make a rookie mistake by not implementing conversion kits. Simple tools like email popups, chat-bots, and callback widgets could improve your conversion rate several times over. Don’t expect your visitors to look for your phone number or an e-mail address hidden somewhere in the corner of your website.
Provide a clear, well-designed, unobtrusive pop-up window to collect user emails. If you can get
visitors on your email customer list you will have many more opportunities to sell them products and services and build trust by answering questions about your company. Customers are used to freebies and gifts that come with collecting emails. Think about a way to reward your visitors that fits with your overall marketing strategy and business values.
- You can offer free shipping or a product discount to every user who leaves their email.
- Be precise and straightforward, always tell what kind of info and offers users will receive from you after signing up.
- Use minimalist design and pleasant graphics for your popups, and drive attention to the “subscribe” button.
- Emphasize the value of your discount by using a bigger font.
- Offer a freebie like a digital book or a product sample.
Reduce Load Times
Slow websites have no right to exist in 2022. According to experts, 79% of website visitors will leave and never return if the page loads longer than seconds. And since most user traffic comes from mobile devices, you should pay special attention to your mobile page design and performance.
- Test how many HTTP requests your website makes and use methods like combining to reduce them.
- Combine and minify all your JS, HTML, and CSS files using special tools.
- Turn on asynchronous script loading.
- Make your JS files load after the rest of the page’s content.
- Your TTFB (Time To First Byte) should be 200 ms or less.
- Choose a better hosting option like a dedicated server.
- Compress your pages using Gzip.
- Turn on browsing caching by installing a plugin.
- Reduce your onsite image sizes by 70% or more and use appropriate file formats.
- Connect to a Content Delivery Network to better serve your worldwide audience.
- Host your videos on YouTube or other external platforms.
- Don’t overuse plugins, remove those that you can do without.
- Perform regular speed audits.
Rely on Multiple Traffic Sources
While nothing beats organic traffic in terms of value for money, there are other sources you should be working with. If your website has a blog you can repurpose and republish your content on other platforms. Users prefer to get their information from multiple sources. If you want to increase outreach, you should start with websites that like Quora or Medium that aggregate valuable user-generated content. Don’t expect everybody to come to your site, come to them instead.
You should still use onsite blogging to retain your regular audience and improve your SEO. But repurposing content allows you to spread your brand-building efforts outside “the borders” of your website. Using additional platforms helps you avoid the “bottleneck” problem when users can’t find valuable info because it’s locked behind a paywall or buried somewhere deep inside your blog. Other sources of traffic like specialized forums, podcasts, ads, and social media can bring additional traffic and boost the value of your website.
Add Onsite Reviews and Testimonials
Unlike publishing content, website owners face the opposite problem when dealing with reviews and testimonials. Most of them rely on third-party services like Yelp to collect reviews about their businesses. But if a company has no user testimonials on its website and relies only on sales claims or just expects visitors to complete a purchase without questioning the product or the business itself, it is losing a large chunk of revenue.
If a visitor has already come to your website don’t send him away looking for reviews and testimonials. You can ask your existing customers for feedback and their personal info and publish it on your home page or use a plugin to connect your website with a popular review platform. Having onsite reviews and recommendations can double the sales helping you build trust with your audience and earn repeat business. Good conversions are impossible without a testimonial page.
Be Careful With Link Building
Google recommends avoiding buying paid links. But still, most website owners use various “gray hat” tactics to purchase backlinks that pass value and authority.
Whether you are going the paid route or building your backlink portfolio organically avoid low-value websites and directories. There are legitimate SEO strategies for building high-quality backlinks like writing guest posts or participating in podcasts. It’s a solid approach if you are looking to connect to similar audiences and niches who might be interested in your offer.
According to SEO experts, sometimes Google penalizes websites that rely exclusively on guest blogging. Services that distribute press releases can be a great alternative. In any case, you should diversify your backlink portfolio by including social media, forums, and high-quality directories.
Conclusion
Many factors can impact your revenue. If you want to improve the value of your website in 2022 and beyond, focus on performance, load times, and SEO. Avoid making mistakes like buying poor-quality backlinks from shady providers, relying on a single traffic source, or forgetting about speeding up the mobile version of your website. Customer experience should always remain your top priority. If you have use cases and customer testimonials you are proud of, don’t hesitate to show them on your website.
