How to Make Your Website User-Friendly

With so much business now being conducted online, creating a website that is user-friendly should be right at the top of your priority list. As there is so much competition out there, people are much more likely to head over to one of your competitors if they can’t easily find the information they are looking for.

There are a number of different approaches that you can take. One is to go to a company like the UX Agency which specialises in user-friendly design and taking a collaborative approach to websites. If you are looking for some general ideas of how to make your site more user-friendly, here are a few top tips.

Strategically Place Your Logo and Contact Information

Your website is what people will most associate with your business, so you need to make sure that it is clearly on display. Research has shown that the top left corner is a good place to choose and it is where people’s eyes are naturally drawn. And your contact information is also absolutely essential. People are often not willing to work particularly hard to find this, so you should make sure it is clearly on display. Include all the different methods you have – phone, email, social media – so people can take their pick.

Make Content Easy to Skim-Read

Although content on a website is obviously important, people don’t tend to read everything word for word. So, you should make sure that everything is easy to skim over for them. Include bullet points and subheadings to break up big chunks of text. This way, people can easily pick out the information that they are looking for – whether this is a particular feature of a product or the details of a service that you offer.

Include a Search Functionality

If you have a website with a lot of pages and information to scour through, adding a search functionality is very useful so people are able to quickly find what they are looking for. Like we  talked about at the start, web users tend to be very ruthless with their time so if they can’t quickly pick out what they have come to find, they are likely to go elsewhere.

Make Your Site Responsive

Over half of all web searches now come from smartphones, so making sure that your site is responsive is very important. You want to give an equally good experience to every visitor, regardless of what device they are using to access your website.

Keep the Navigation Simple and Easy to Follow

You want people to be able to find their way around on your website without too much difficulty, so keep the navigations as easy to follow as you can. Name each page in a way that is clear what people are going to find when they are on there. The sub-navigation should also relate directly to the main navigation. You could also put in links that bring people directly back to the home screen so they can start again.      

Many Businesses Make These Common Marketing Mistakes. Does Yours?

Any business owner worth their salt is aware of just how important marketing is. After all, you could have the greatest product or service in the world, and it’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference if no one actually knows about it. There are few things more important to a business than getting the word out and bringing in new customers. And yet, despite how important it is, there are a lot of businesses that still end up making the same marketing mistakes over and over again. Many of these mistakes are rather subtle, and people only notice their impact over a long period of time, but they can often end up causing some pretty serious problems for your business as a whole. Here are just a few of the most common mistakes and how you can avoid making them.

Poorly integrated SEO

There’s no denying that online marketing is probably that most important marketing method out there for many businesses. The majority of your customers will find you through search engines like Google, and every year the number of phone books sold is going down. However, despite this, there are a lot of businesses that still aren’t able to take advantage of the things that sites like Google can offer. Sure, most businesses are aware of the importance of SEO and how it impacts their search engine rank. But they still seem to fail to understand how to use it properly. You can’t just throw out keywords randomly without integrating them into your content properly. Speak to any SEO agency, and they will tell you just how important integration into the content really is. It might be worth your while to outsource your SEO needs to a professional agency to ensure that you’re really making the most of it.

Focusing on a single platform

Sure, digital marketing is important, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the only form of marketing that matters. One of the biggest mistakes that a lot of newer businesses make is the fact that they focus on a single platform while completely ignoring any others. This means that they are likely missing out on a large number of customers who might not use the internet but are very likely to respond to TV or newspaper advertising. The key is to be aware of your demographic and understand what their media consumption habits are. If you’re aiming for a younger generation, then you should absolutely focus on things like social media, but if your main customer base is slightly older, then doing that may not be the best way forward.

Boring content

No matter what demographic you’re going after, no one is interested in dry, uninteresting advertising. You’ve got to be willing to create content that customers will want to engage with and, most importantly, share. Whether that’s a viral video that people can share on social media, or simply something that they can discuss around the water cooler at work the following day. Create an emotional reaction in your customers of any sort, and your marketing will be much more effective.

How To Stay Ahead Of Your Competitors On Social…

I created a free marketing plan recently for a plastic surgeon based in Harley street.

Currently, he is not using any form of social media other than a Facebook page and he was really taken aback when I managed to find his top competitors are already very influential on Twitter, and he hasn’t even tweeted yet.

I think it can be very demoralising when you see your competitor has thousands of followers and you seem to be following 500 with only 50 following you back! But there ARE ways to get ahead of the competition, it requires consistency and determination.

Follow your competitors feeds

Rather than see competitors as a threat, I followed most of my competitors in the London area and made a Twitter list for them. This way I can get ideas about what promotions they are offering, which potential customers I can engage with and who to follow.

Most of my competitors have been in the freelance marketing scene for a number of years which makes them the PERFECT candidates to learn from. I check which of their posts received the most engagement, which blog posts had the most shares and look to recreate that using my own products – then I follow all THEIR followers and engage with them. 

Blogging

I’ve spent hours, weeks, months trying to source the best blogging templates, the best marketing bloggers, HOW to add calls to action in a blog post, you name it, and last year, a business blog I created literally blew up and we doubled our traffic within 6 months without paid ads – it took A LOT of marketing though!

The issue with paying for ads is that the moment you stop the paid ad, you lose your potential customer where as blogging is free and in the long term can really increase your organic traffic. In fact, I doubled my last clients traffic by creating 2-3 blog posts a week all under 500 words and you can do it too, it just takes time and effort.

No time? Try outsourcing it to a freelancer on people per hour.

Not sure how to blog? Simply take a look at my tips below

• • Create Emotion –  The most shareable content on Pinterest ignites one of the following emotions. Surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger, or disgust.

• • Useful – Why is this blog post so valuable? Ultimately how will your service /product make my life easier?

• • A Catchy Title –  Titles simply sell the content. ‘How to ‘ posts are very popular for example, another example would be ’10 reasons why you shouldn’t ………..’. Need ideas? Then think about using a title generator. 

• • SEO – Try to be as specific as possible with your keywords. If you need assistance with SEO, then look to download a wordpress Plug in such as Yoast. 

• • Informative – Add a fact here, for example, if I were to write a blog post about why a customer should buy my photos, I would add an interesting fact. ‘Did you know that 90% of the transmitted information in the human brain is visual’ 

• • Images – Taking the above fact, we can see how a great image can be a large factor in closing that sale. It also helps to break up the monotony of long paragraphs. Try taking a look at Canva, a fantastic platform with templates specifically for Twitter, Pinterest and the added option to add text to your image.

Making Twitter Lists Of Your Influencers

I think Twitter lists are VERY underrated. It’s vital a business finds influencers in their niche, so they can easily retweet appropriate content to their followers.

If you wish to follow influences outside your niche, then use your personal Twitter account, not your business one. Interested in influential marketers? Check out this Forbes list!

Sharing On 1 Platform Only

I hate to tell you this, but when I started creating 3 blog posts a week for my last client, I had to SHARE them on multiple social media platforms, NOT just my clients Twitter and Facebook pages. You have spent a whole morning creating a masterpiece. Don’t you want people to actually SEE it?

Take Action – Here are my top Facebook groups and Google Plus groups for business. This is where I share all my content. I also use Triberr where other Twitter users in my niche SHARE my content to their followers for FREE. You can find more about that here.

Triberr

Triberr is a social network for bloggers. The idea is to find other bloggers who write about the same topics. These writers group up in a tribe.

Whenever one blogger writes a post, the others read, comment and share it with their social networks.

The best part is, you pool together all your followers giving yourself a larger reach. So the more tribes you join, the larger your social media reach.