Just having a website is not enough: it must also perform.
Nowadays running a business without a successful website - almost unimaginable. To generate customers, it's not just about having a website, but getting everything out of it. Factors like programming, design, content and SEO are fundamental building blocks. However, all this has no value if the gears don't mesh and, for example, the loading time throws a spanner in the works.
Little things make the difference between clicking on or closing a website. In this blog post, you'll find out which conceptual things are needed for a successful website and how to beat the competition with the right website measures.
Success factor web hosting: What is there to consider?
A website is only as good as its web hosting. Why? The keywords here are speed, security and stability. Good hosting ensures that your website is fast, reliable and stable - the be-all and end-all of a successful website. After all, who likes to spend time on a website with long loading times that, in the worst case, even crashes? Other important selection criteria are server availability, storage space, resources and support. Find out exactly what is important for your website and compare hosting providers with each other.
Handling as a success factor: The website as a tool
It's good if it's simple: The best website tool - the so-called "content management system" - is useless if it is too complicated for the user to operate. Therefore, make sure that your No. 1 marketing tool is easy to use and does not make too many technical demands on you. The website backend - the area through which you build your website and enter your content - should be as easy to use as possible.
So you can always easily add new content yourself, create new pages and landing pages, upload new images or publish latest news on the website. This way, your website will always stay up to date and become a powerful marketing tool that will really help you effectively generate customers.
Success factor domain name: Which domain is the right one?
Once the hosting of your website is settled, you can register a domain . It is the address that visitors enter to find your website. The simpler, the better. The domain name should be thematically appropriate to the content of your website and generally short, easy to remember and distinctive. Also, use the .de domain extension for national websites and the .com extension for international websites.
Targets and target groups as a success factor: Where is the journey heading?
To make your website successful, you should first be aware of why and for whom you are creating your website. This will help you to better align your website with your goals.
Set goals:
What exactly do you want to achieve with your website? Sell products, inform about certain topics, collect contact data or generate leads? Always formulate your goals from the perspective of your potential customers. Because you are not building your website primarily for yourself, but for your customers.
Define target group:
Who do you want to reach with your website? To make your website successful, you need to define your target group exactly. This means not only age, marital status, profession, income level, but also what your customers expect. How should you present your product or service? In this context, it is helpful to work with the concept of "buyer personas". Buyer personas are semi-fictional, imaginary people who represent a certain group of buyers.
CMS success factor: website creation made easy
Content management systems, or CMS for short, are software systems that are used to easily create, maintain and manage websites. Whether in text, image, video or other form - content of various kinds can be easily and clearly managed by means of a CMS. The advantages: Content can be easily and independently adapted even without extensive programming knowledge, quasi by means of a "modular system". There are still many design templates and you save an enormous amount of time in the creation of a website in contrast to self-programming.
Successful CMS systems are e.g.:
- Webflow
- Shopify
- WordPress
- Typo3
Success factor website structure: The basis for your website
Planning is everything! Even before you create your website, think about how it should be structured in terms of content. You need a clear concept for a successful structure. Which main pages and which sub-pages do you need? Which service pages or which category pages do you want to include? First sketch out the planned pages and then how they should be linked together in the most sensible way.
Success factor home page: What should it look like?
First impressions count. The home page is the first thing users see when they come to your website. If it looks like a mess, they probably won't stay long. The user must be able to see at a glance what he will find there and whether he is in the right place. A good and clear structure is essential here. The goal is to create a clear start page that invites users to linger and makes them want more.
Success factor texts: Tips and information about copywriting
Once the most important building blocks of your website are in place, you can start texting. But here, too, it's better to think first and only then reach for the pen or keyboard.
The speech:
Hello, you. Yes, that's you. You are the most important person for me right now. That's exactly what you should convey to your customers. Focus on the customer and explain to them that you can make their problems disappear into thin air. Address your customers directly - with "you" or "you're", depending on the target group.
Less is more:
The content of a website is not good when nothing more can be added, but rather when nothing more can be left out. True to the motto "less is more", you should stick to short sentences, clear text structures with subheadings and a choice of words appropriate to the target group.
Just do it:
Do you have any questions about XY? Get in touch with us. Especially on content pages that describe your own services, you should ask users to take action at the end of a text. Arouse the interest of your customers and create an incentive for interaction. Interactions bring more clicks. And more clicks mean more sales.
SEO success factor: make your website visible on the web
150 million search queries per day in Germany. And only those who are at the forefront of these searches have a realistic chance of being successful with their website. With the help of search engine optimization(SEO), you can climb to the pole positions in the search results of search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. SEO concerns both the technology, the content and the design of your website. Therefore, a holistic concept is needed here.
Earlier is always better:
SEO manages to increase the visibility of your website, rank it higher in search results for important keywords and thus generate more traffic. Plan for SEO from the very beginning. Therefore, relevant keywords and content structure should be clarified even before writing the first line of code.
Keyword research:
Who? How? What? And where? - these are the central questions that your keywords must answer. In order to find out the appropriate keywords, you should conduct a keyword research. In this way, you will find out which words and word combinations users use to search for your product or service.
URLs:
A proper URL can also improve the SEO ranking of your site. So, if you want Google to rank your website high and consider it trustworthy, your URL should be short, contain a main keyword, have clear URL structures and have a shallow menu depth or no nested menu.
Meta tags:
Meta tags provide a search engine with information about your website. These three meta tags are the most important tags for SEO:
- Meta title tag: will be displayed in the search result as page title
- Meta description: short description of the page
- Robots tag: to control indexing
Mobile First:
More and more people on their cell phones, more and more users on the Internet with their cell phones. Mobile first has become increasingly important in recent years. A non-mobile website can therefore endanger the ranking. This is because with the "Mobile First" principle, Google stipulates that a page's rankings are based on its mobile website rankings and not its desktop rankings. The optimal presentation of your own website on mobile devices is therefore worthwhile.
Design as a success factor: Why it is essential for websites
The eye not only eats, it also clicks. If your website is unattractive, the user usually doesn't stay on it very long. Therefore, make sure that the design is modern, simple, clearly structured and appropriate for the target group and the services.
UX & UI Design:
UX (User Experience) Design and UI (User Interface) Design are different types of website design. UX focuses on positive user experiences and the most comfortable use and operation of the website possible by means of an appealing web design. In addition to usability, the user's emotions during and after website use also play a role here. UI, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the visual design of digital applications. Here, the focus is on optimal intuitive, interactive use of a website by the user.
Beautiful design invites you to linger:
People like to look at beautiful things for longer. If a website has an appealing, modern web design, users stay longer on it. And a higher dwell time of the users in turn has a positive influence on the search engine optimization of your website and thus also on the rankings. So if your website is visually appealing, it will usually also be ranked higher - and thus clicked on again.
Is UI and UX design the new SEO?..:
Complicated, yet quite simple. Web design and SEO both have an enormous impact on the way search engines interpret and index your website. A well thought-out design always brings more usability - and that goes down well with Google & Co. So if the design of your website is appealing, it will have a direct impact on your Google rankings. A good UI and UX design is therefore already half the battle for good SEO.
Measuring and evaluating as a success factor: Why numbers are important?
Trust is good, control is better. How much traffic is happening on my website? How many people visit my website? And how long do they stay on average? You can get the answers to these questions by evaluating the performance of your website.
Where does the traffic originate?
Which of my pages are visited most often? Which pages are hardly ever visited? And where do my users come from? By determining how many users have visited which pages, when, and from which regions they are searching, you get important information on how your site "ticks " - and thus information on how you can make your site better step by step.
Dwell time:
How long do visitors stay on my website and how long do they spend on average on the individual subpages? This data also provides information about your current success with the website.
How much is the fish?
At the beginning, you have already defined your target group and thus also the size of the target group. But how many users do you really reach with your website? Does the website pay off? Or do you need to take measures to reach more users? The number of "website visitors" from the analysis tools provides you with important information about how strongly your site is frequented.
Tools for measuring success:
Below you will find three analysis tools that provide you with important performance figures for your website.
- Google Analytics
- Matomo
- Etracker Analytics
Website technology as a success factor: tips and must-haves
Quickly reach anything, anywhere, anytime. Even your website. That's what people want these days. With the right website technology, that's no problem.
Loading time:
You probably know it too: You want to order your new favorite sneakers and the website loads and loads and loads. Annoying - and bang - clicked away again. Keep the loading time for your website as low as possible.
Responsive Design:
Your website looks good everywhere and is easy to use everywhere. Responsive design means that your website is optimized for all internet-enabled devices (desktop, tablets, smartphones). Since almost everything is now done via smartphone and tablet, Responsive Design is more important than ever.
Open Graph and Twitter Cards:
Open Graph and Twitter Cards provide meta information from your website to Facebook and Twitter. They enable different display formats for images, videos, tweets, etc. Without Open Graph or Twitter Cards, your content on the social media platforms is only displayed in a limited informative way.
SSL encryption:
Better safe than sorry. Security on your website is essential. SSL encryption, or Secure Sockets Layer, provides the "s" in "https://" and ensures that the connection to this website is secure. For some website operators, encryption is mandatory, but it is recommended for everyone.
Robots.txt and sitemap.xml
Make it easy for the search engine: robots.txt is a plain text file. It is stored in the root directory of the server and regulates which pages of your website may be read and indexed by search engines. A sitemap.xml, on the other hand, is a file with a list of all URLs of a website. With the help of the sitemap.xml, a search engine quickly and easily captures all existing content pages.
Website content as a success factor: What types of content are there?
Content is king - or - those who deliver good content are successful. The content of your website should not only be good, but also exciting, diverse and meaningful. In addition to the classic content forms of text and images, there are several other content forms.
FAQs:
You ask - we answer. People often ask the same questions and are happy to get them answered quickly and easily. So answer all the important questions directly by themselves on your website. They form highly relevant content and have a positive impact on SEO.
Blog:
A blog creates interaction. As an interactive and dynamic medium, the blog generates a lot of traffic on your website. Write articles or posts at regular intervals that relate to a specific topic and discuss them with your readers.
Videos:
In times of TikTok, Instagram & Co. videos are probably more popular than ever. They are easy to digest, descriptive and increase the dwell time of your visitors.
Glossary:
The ideal way to create high-quality, relevant content for your website is to do this in the form of a glossary. Here, for example, the 50 most important technical terms of your own industry are explained on a separate content page.
Newsletter:
Newsletters are still a very important communication tool for good customer retention. Create attention for yourself and your brand through regular and exciting content sent directly to the end consumer.
Images:
A picture is worth a thousand words. If a piece of content contains at least one visual element, it is shared twice as often on social platforms. Images work quickly and evoke emotions. They enliven the rhythm of your page and build trust. They are existential for a good website.
Gaining trust:
Show your customers that they can trust you. Include reviews, logos, seals and memberships on your website. They create a deeper bond between your brand and the user and leave them feeling safe.
Success factor website features: What they are, why they are important
Bells and whistles? Not at all! Technical features are an important factor for the success of a website. They make lead generation more efficient or make the usability of the website more pleasant for the user.
The search function:
Seek and you shall find. That's how it should be on your website, too. Direct and fast answers increase the customer experience and keep users on your website longer.
Social Media Button:
Promote your own content. Where better to do that than on social media? Your readers should like, comment and share what they can, so why not make it as easy as possible for them? However, you should only include the social buttons of those portals on which you are regularly active.
Contact form:
Your website should allow your potential customers to contact you quickly and easily. A contact form helps with this. The rule here is: brevity is the spice of life. Only ask for the most necessary information so as not to scare your users away.
You have more questions about what makes a website successful? You would like to take off with your business website or your online store? We will be happy to advise you on how to make your website a success.
