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If you have a business, then you either already have a website, or you are in desperate need of one. In the 21st Century, if you don’t have a website, chances are you will sink without a trace. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply buy a domain and stick up a few quickly cranked out pages if you want to attract visitors (who will hopefully become customers) to your little part of the web – you need to spend quite a bit of time and effort perfecting your website.

To help you out, here are the secrets to a successful website, which if employed, should see your traffic, and your sales soar:

Looks Matter

You don’t need to spend a fortune hiring the best website designer on the planet to create your website, but if you don’t invest any tie or money into the way your website looks, then even if they do make it to your site, they probably won’t stick around long – certainly not long enough to make a purchase anyway. No, if you want to make your website a success, you need to at least invest in a decent template or pay a decent designer to create something that speaks to your target audience and looks fresh and clean enough that it won’t be mistaken as a scam site.  

Pay Per Click Advertising

In the early days, it can be difficult to drive traffic to your website, which means, no matter how well it is designed, or how good the content is; you’ll struggle to sell anything.

One thing that can help with this is using pay per click ads, which will be prominently displayed on various platforms where your target audience are likely to be looking. If you don’t know how they work, or you don’t have the time to deal with them, pay per click management services can be competitive, and very effective. Just make sure that you do some kind of advertising until things pick up a bit!                                                                 

Content is King

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It might sound like a cliche now, but it is nevertheless still true that content is king on the internet at least. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling dog toys or designer bags, you need to write engaging articles about the subject and related issues if you want your website to be successful and your company to make lots of sales. You can’t just put your products up on display and expect people to come and find them – you need excellent content to draw them in.

What makes good content? If you’re brand new to this, you might want to ask an SEO expert to help you with this, and perhaps take over content creation for you. However, to create good content, all you basically need is an interesting angle, some well-researched keywords, which are related to the products and services you offer, and a unique voice; the rest will come to you.

Effortless Navigation

It doesn’t matter one little bit how great your business website is if it is too difficult for people to find what they are looking for, or even worse, pay for the goods in their cart. Which is why you should have a web designer test your site for usability and make any changes, if necessary, so that anyone who visits your website can, at a glance, see what it’s about and how it can be used.

SEO

I mentioned search engine optimization (SEO) above in the context of content, but it bears mentioning again here because good SEO is about more than using the right keywords, It’s also about correctly embedding images, using meta tags and keeping plugins and scripts that aren’t essential to a minimum, which is why you might want to hire a professional. If you have poor SEO, then you simply won’t rise up the ranks of Google, and you’ll have great difficulty getting eyes on your business.

Regular Updating

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Updating your website regularly is very important because, although the other things in this post may help your website achieve success for a while, the internet is fast moving, and if you don’t move with it by adding new content and updating your SEO, for example, you will get left behind, and your visitors will be stolen by a more up-to-date competitor, which is the last thing you want.

When it comes to websites, there are never any guarantees. But if you implement all of these things into your strategy, you’ll dramatically increase your chances of running a successful website that boosts your business.