Merely having a website is no longer enough.
Your website should reflect your business, so you’d want to make it look professional and informational to convince the visitor to do business with you.

Your website is your chance to create a first good impression of your business or organisation and promote a sense of reputation.

Besides, a compelling website provides your present and prospective clients a way to connect with you and find out more about the services you offer.

In my experience with several clients over the years, I’ve found out how small changes in the structure or content of a website can yield significant results as well as design and content styles that make just little impact.

Working with clients, I’ve discovered that while each website is unique, great websites contain fundamental features that make them a big success with the website visitors.

I’ve summarised them into ten elements that make a compelling website below:

Visual appeal
Humans are visual creatures, and anything with a soothing appeal to the senses will always grab attention.

So if you want to pique and retain the web surfer’s interest long enough to want to check out other ‘juicy’ parts of your website, this has to be top of your priority list.

With the short attention span of the average web user today, you’ll lose valuable traffic if you can’t engage them immediately on a single click to your website.

It’s essential your images and graphics are relevant, high quality and original and help to tell or enhance your business story succinctly.

You can choose to hire a professional photographer or take your website photos with a good camera, while also working with an excellent graphic designer. Make sure your website conveys your brand essence, and you’re willing to invest a little more to achieve this if necessary.

Keep it clean
The best designs are all about simplicity – not having too many things going on at once.

You’ll get in the way of your website users if you have lots of jumbled colours, menu system, images, graphics, messaging and pop-ups on your website.

Make sure to keep all of these elements minimal and soft on the eye, along with a clear and simple colour scheme and an adequate amount of white spaces. Otherwise, you could easily distract or even turn off your site visitors.

Branded elements
Often, your website is your first and most crucial resource to showcase your brand, competence and degree of industry authority. It’s the digital mirror of your brand, so make sure it accurately and positively reflects your company with the right branded elements.

So, stick to your core colour scheme, integrating your core messages and value proposition, and crucially, using a crisp, high-resolution logo.

Mobile responsiveness
The smartphone has become so versatile that more and more businesses are initiated and concluded on the small device compared to regular desktop computers. Therefore, for maximum effect, it’s vital your website functions well on mobile phones and tablets too.

Making your website responsive means the site perfectly adjusts to the size, style and unique features of whatever digital device and screen it is being viewed on.

Great content
While a visually appealing website will grab the visitor’s attention, only great content can sustain their attention enough to want to know more about the services you offer, your business value proposition and eventually convert to customers.

Expertly written and niche-perfect website copies that engage the reader without sounding jargon-y will help persuade a business prospect on your website that you’re a good fit for their needs.

Top quality content by professional and experienced copywriters is essential to getting potential clients to do business with you.

Make sure to have top quality website/marketing copies done for not just the homepage, but also all the website service pages, including ‘About Us,’ ‘Contact Us’ and Blog (which needs regular updates for SEO goals).

Simple, functional forms
What’s the use of an attractive website with great content and easy-to-use interface if it can’t capture any leads for your business? Don’t forget that the primary goal of setting up a business website is to market your services to an online audience.

A simple, functional form with all the necessary fields is your number one website tool to reach and convince your target customer and earn profits.

Loud and clear CTA
Except they clicked a link to another landing page on your website, your homepage is the first place people will go to when they visit your site.

The implication is that your homepage is your biggest platform to tell your visitors about your unique selling point and be loud and clear about it!

While you may be very clear about your CTA (Call to Action), don’t assume it’ll be the same to the guest on your website.

How do you effectively seize the moment? Make sure your site visitor quickly and unambiguously gets answers to these questions as soon as they land on your website:

- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- How do you satisfy the visitor’s needs?
- What is your unique selling point?

Remember your website guest has a vast amount of information and advertisement grappling for their attention, so make it easy for them to decide to focus on yours instead in their search for some specific solutions.

Your site visitors will likely leave if they spend longer than 7 seconds trying to figure out the ‘what,’ ‘who,’ ‘how,’ ‘why,’ ‘when,’ and ‘where’ of your business offerings.

A compelling website uses a simple, clear and loud CTA and makes it easy to convert web visitors to customers.

An intriguing ‘About Us’ page
Don’t fail to take advantage of the ‘About Us’ column on your homepage footer to summarise your business story powerfully. Use the opportunity to connect with your prospects. Make it convincing. Keep it updated continuously.

The ‘About Us’ page is one of the first pages guests will visit when they land on your website, so make sure you provide useful and concise information without boasting or promising more than you and your business can offer.

Contact us page
You sure want your potential customers to contact you, so don’t make them work trying to do that. Make sure to provide simple and direct contact details. Include all possible options to make it easy and quick to reach you – phone number, email address, form, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter etc.

Don’t forget to provide links to your contact page at various key points and CTAs buttons on your homepage and other service pages.

Maximise the full potentials of SEO
An appealing website design and great content are core features of a compelling website, but if no one sees it or visits the site, all of that will amount to just blinking in the dark.

According to web use stats, over 90% of online activities start from the search bars of major search engines like Google and Bing. Therefore, it’s crucial that you develop an effective Search Engine Optimisation strategy for your site.

SEO is not something that very visible to see or confined to a single or few strategies, but it is very central to your digital marketing goals.

However, your website content is a good place to start.

First, your domain is relevant to your SEO. So, make sure your website URL contains at least a keyword connected with your business – this could be in terms of your brand name, professional niche or business location.

Also, ensure content and images on your website contain your business keywords, metadata, and H1 and H2.

Make sure you have a focus keyword for each page on your website. This refers to the main service area or core message of the specific page. The page content must also align well with and support the focus keyword.

This might seem a bit complex, but using an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO in WordPress hosting can simplify the process. It will help you ensure each page on your website has the right focus keywords and in the right density, and alerts you to whether the page is SEO-friendly or not.

In addition to letting you know how optimised the page is, Yoast SEO also provides you suggestion on how to improve it and score a higher point on the page’s ‘SEO-friendly’ rating to boost its chances of visibility on the top Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) (75% of users will not search beyond the first page).

What’s next?
Your website is your business’ digital presence round the clock and globe. So keep it impressive, informative, simple, clean and easily discoverable on Google and other major search engines.

Not sure where to begin to achieve a compelling website? No problem! It’s our speciality at medainspiredng.com.

Perhaps you want to have your current website redesign and content redone? We can also help and deliver a brand new site that’ll leave a great and lasting impression on your business prospects online.

Contact us today and see just what we can do for you!

https://mediainspiredng.com/10-elements-that-make-a-website-compelling