Long Term Investment
A good advantage of having a well-built website is the upkeep costs being relativity low. A cheaply built site can often cause problems for the best of designers, making the changes and issue resolves you need more difficult in the long run. A well-designed website will be malleable to change with minimal effort on the designer’s part, saving you money.
Brand Consistency
A professionally built site will reinforce your brand on every page, from colours to logos in a way that cheaper websites can’t capture. How your brand is represented on a page through colours, imagery and layout is top priority when marketing yourself online, and when a poorly designed site doesn’t get your brand message across, customers are getting a negative first impression. Your site needs to be sleek, vibrant and appealing if you want to get a browsers attention.
The Google Algorithm
The Google algorithm is always changing and evolving, one change that Google has begun implementing is filtering search results looking for certain factors in a website. FirstPageSage stated that the algorithm considers these factors when filtering out sites:
- Links: 28%
- Consistent Output: 24%
- Keyword Rich Meta Titles: 10%
- Mobile Friendly: 8%
- Highly Specific Landing Pages: 7%
- Site Speed: 6%
- Clear Labelling of Information on Page: 5%
- Schema Markups: 4%
- Social Signals: 3%
- Age of Site: 2%
- Keywords in URLs: 2%
- Other Factors: 1%
So not only does having a well optimised site increase retentions, but also ranks you higher in the search results for your given field.
Standing Out
It’s 2017 and 50% of small business still don’t have any form of online presence, that means there’s a good chance that if you’re door to door with your competition at least one of them won’t have a website. Then considering that it’s reported by Espresso Digital that 97% of small business websites are ineffective and not mobile friendly, the online domain could be open territory to stand out against the competition.
Capture Customers Close to Home
One thing that a lot of small business owners claim is that they don’t need a website because all of their business is local. This is no longer the be-all and end-all argument for if a business should have/ needs a website, as it has been reported by LocalVox that “70% of UK households now use Internet when shopping locally for products and services.” This means that small businesses could potentially only be seeing 30% of their customer base actively buying due to lack of online presence.
These points give some insight as to what goes into developing a well-built site, from customer retention to design. Every factor needs to be considered when putting together an idea of what your site should have. However, the main points to consider are always:
- If the site is easy to use for the consumer
- Checking as many of those algorithm filters as possible
- Keeping a consistent brand style across your site
With these factors in place a website can do no wrong for your business.