Top 10 features which are must for your business website
If your business is not on the internet, then your business will be out of business. – Bill Gates
It is no hidden fact that with the evolving technology, the dependency of people on the internet has drastically increased.
People are always searching for their needs online, be it any course they want to study, anything they need to buy, any new place to visit, a shop or any information for that matter.
When it comes to the business perspective, studies show that 80% of the consumers search online to find any product or service that they might require.
With such a huge potential consumer base your business must have an online presence, to grow.
Customers will want to find more information about your business before they decide on using your product or service.
A business website will solve all their concerns.
A good business website can make your business surge ahead of your competitors.
Further, it can boost the online presence, generate more users’ interest, and better return on investment (ROI). But you might wonder why some businesses even after having a website fail to cut ice with the audience.
It all comes down to the website design and the features embedded on your website.
Even with the right marketing strategy, a website with poor features will only repel the customers.
We have listed down the top 10 features which are a must for your website, which when coupled with the professional web design will help you grasp lead in a quick span of time.
- Online Chat
Potential customers who visit your website might come up with some queries related to your services or any information provided on your website.
They can reach out to you in the mail ID and phone number which are given but customers rarely like to wait especially in today’s fast paced world where everybody is looking for an instant solution.
Also, instead of taking their time to go around your website looking for information, or waiting for your email response, they might as well switch to another competitor’s page.
Having an online chat feature would be a great option to avoid this.
This would help the customers to connect with you instantly regarding their clarifications, also allowing you to carry on the conversation with a potential client in real-time.
Studies show that people are more likely to return to a website with an online chat option and are also more likely to make their purchase or take the services which you are providing.
There are many feasible plugins available in the market which offer effective and speedy live chat support.
- Contact Form
Contact form is yet another way to make your organization available directly for the potential client to reach out to you.
Your website visitors can reach out to you by asking their questions or leaving a message in the message box provided in the contact form.
It will also gather their individual information of the visitor such as name and email address.
The main purpose of a contact form is to generate leads.
Though a lot of information can be covered in your website sections or FAQs, you can strategically leave some questions without any answers, prompting leads to contact you.
Make sure that this contact form is easily accessible on your contact page.
You would also want your contact form to be easy to use, with the minimum details to fill so that visitors can easily get in touch with you.
- Blogs
Blogs are one of the most effective ways to build brand awareness.
Providing relevant and useful content to your target audience in the form of blogs can help you drive traffic to your business website.
People online are always looking for solutions for their problems or things which can make their life easy.
Conduct keyword research and search for topics relevant to your industry. Write good quality content around these topics.
To make these blogs effective as a lead generating strategy on your website, you need to add call-to-action (CTA).
CTAs guide the readers to perform a specific action on your site, whether it is subscribing to a newsletter, blog, or directing the reader to your landing page.
Without CTA it’ll be difficult to create conversions on your landing page through blogs.
Along with lead generation, quality blogs will also help you to develop your website domain authority which will, in turn, help you in ranking your website on search engines.
- Newsletter Subscription
Newsletters are excellent ways to build relationships with your website visitors.
Newsletters are basically reports that contain relevant news, articles, product releases, latest updates, special benefits, offers, or any other piece of information associated with the product or services provided by you.
Subscribing to these newsletters allows the user to receive this newsletter periodically.
Periodicity boosts the foundation of a relationship with your potential client as once the clients start engaging with the sent newsletter, you not only create brand awareness but also promote client loyalty.
Newsletter forms can be integrated at various places on the website, from where it is prominently discoverable.
A great way to put this feature on your website is to add a pop-up which encourages users to subscribe to your newsletter by filling in their email address.
Pop-ups can be made to appear after a certain time interval on the website, or when the user is hovering over a particular X button or before closing the page, prompting the user to take an action.
- Lead Generation Form
In the sales funnel, lead generation is an important stage for your business.
This is the first point of contact wherein a user coming to your website shows some interest or curiosity in your business, which can eventually lead to a potential client.
Lead is generated when the potential customer provides you with their contact details.
These details are collected using a lead generation form, which can be integrated into your business website.
A lead generation form is highly effective and converting when users are enticed to fill the form in exchange for some offer which could be a coupon, content, job opportunity, or any information which could be beneficial to them.
Providing your users with such offers that they can’t resist will help you gain a new lead.
While implementing a lead generation form, keep in mind that it should be as easy to fill as possible. Users don’t like to fill in a lot of details hence ask for contact details in the form, as minimal as possible.
- One-click Call
Regardless of the work put in while building the website and providing useful information all over the pages, your potential customers might still prefer to talk to a live person.
Sometimes customers will want to know more about the product or services offered before making a final decision and would not want to wait around for the email reply.
Providing a phone number or a one click call will not only make it easier for the customers to connect to your support team easily but also is a great way to build trust among them.
Potential customers are assured that they have a real person to interact with and get their queries solved instantly.
Either you can display your phone number noticeably over your website in the contact us section or add click to call option.
With click to call option, the user can initiate the voice call with one click directly from the browser or the app they are using.
Some of the click to call features allows the hosts and guests to use masked numbers, allowing the personal numbers to remain private.
- Google Analytics Integrated
Google Analytics is a web analytics service, provided by Google, which gives you an in-depth analysis of the visitors to your website.
It’s a very easy process to integrate this tool on your website.
All you need to do is set up a google analytics account and copy a provided piece of code on your website.
This will enable google analytics to start collecting data from your website automatically.
The data collected can be viewed in the form of various reports.
Google Analytics reports will give you in-depth detail on the number of users visiting your website, users bouncing off the website after visiting, most visited pages, age, gender, device, & location of your user.
You can also analyze the source from where the traffic is coming from, whether it’s from social media or directly from google or any other medium.
All these details will help you track if you are achieving your business goals and help you improve strategies to achieve better performance for your business website.
- Security plugins such as – Wordfence
Any security breach on your business website can bring severe damage to your company’s online reputation.
Hackers can compromise your website and steal data belonging to your company and users.
You might even lose access to your website which in turn can cause huge damage to not only your brand but also the SEO rankings.
Customers might think twice before being associated with your company citing security trust issues.
To refrain from being hacked, your business website should follow the best security practices.
One of the most secure platforms for hosting a website is WordPress, wherein one-third of the world’s websites are hosted.
Nevertheless, you can also add extra security by using a plugin.WordPress has many plugins to choose from where one is more advanced than the other.
One such, most popular plugin is WordFence.
It has various features that will not only prevent any malicious attack on your website but also help you recover from a successful attack.
It will automatically block suspicious traffic and IP addresses.
It will protect users’ passwords in case of data leaks and also monitor the source code change in case any attack tries to take place.
- Page title for every page, meta tags and meta keywords
You might make the best website for your business but without any traffic on that website, all your efforts will go in vain, and to make this happen your website must be search engine optimized (SEO).
Though a digital marketer can ensure traffic on your website there are some things you can keep in mind while creating your website to have a better chance in the ranking.
One such feature is the optimized page title and meta descriptions.
Page title shows the title of the web-page and meta description shows a short summary about what the web page consists of.
These are short pieces of HTML codes that can be integrated into every webpage.
You can research the ranking keywords associated with your page and have them in your page title and meta description. This will increase the chance of your webpage coming up in a user’s search query.
- Sitemap and submission to major search engines
The XML sitemap is basically a list of all your website URLs.
It works as a roadmap to show the search engine what content is available on your website and how to reach it.
It is an essential part of SEO as it allows the search engines to quickly find the essential pages on your website.
Sometimes it becomes hard for Google to find an important page of your website as there won’t be any internal link pointing to the page.
In such cases, the XML sitemap ensures that Google can find and crawl them.
You will need to submit this sitemap to the search engines manually. Each search engine will have a set of steps to add the sitemap.
Once submitted the search engines will be signaled each time there is a page update on your website.
This will force a new crawl, which will in turn increase the chance of your page ranking in case you have added new relevant keywords.
Conclusion
Though there are a lot more elements to be taken into consideration while designing your website, the features listed above are the must-haves for your business website.
This will ensure that your website will give an extra edge over others in the market.
We at Teknotrait Solutions, provide web development services ensuring that the website along with the precise information even consists of the right features.
Our quality services are offered at affordable prices, for all scales of business.
Check our services here, to know more.