You might have heard it over the last years – if you want to truly engage with your audience, you need to offer digital solutions with superb user experiences. Today, apps, platforms, and websites have to go above and beyond to please users, because those users have come to expect that software doesn’t just have to work: they have to delight.
That’s especially true for websites, which have enjoyed a mighty transformation over the last decade. Once thought of as just a group of informative pages with a dash of flair, websites now are closer to mobile apps than to the static pages the world once knew. That means that they can now combine top-notch functionality, notable performance, and beautiful design. That’s a winning combination right there and aiming any lower is setting yourself up for failure.
But what happens if you have all that but your engagement is still low? What’s there to do if you have invested in an amazing design strategy but you just aren’t getting the eyes and your competition is beating you? Don’t worry. It’s a common mistake to think that having a beautiful website will be enough to drive traffic and engagement up. Fortunately, there are quite a few things you can do right now, all of which we review below.
#1 Rev Up Your SEO Efforts
Having a great website without any search engine optimization (SEO) work whatsoever is like opening a bar without telling anyone about it. That’s because an SEO strategy is the best way you can organically point people to your site when they are searching for the types of products and services you’re offering.
SEO is a complex and layered practice that needs you to pay attention to many aspects, from your website’s loading speed and mobile-friendliness to the kind of content you have and the way you build your pages. Going through all the things that make up a good SEO strategy exceeds the purpose of this article. But it’s worth mentioning it, as SEO is one of the crucial factors that might be negatively affecting your site’s traffic.
#2 Create Useful and Relevant Content
There was a time (not so long ago) when the mantra “the content is king” resonated in every corner of the internet. The driving force behind that was that people wanted relevant information about products, services, and pretty much everything out there. So, the idea was to create content that provided value and was useful for the target audience.
While the mantra has fortunately been cast aside, the idea remains. People love to consume content in all of its forms, so your website needs doctored content that blends a promotional side with a more informative approach, all packaged in different content pieces, from blog posts to videos. You need to find out what your target audience wants and needs to know about your industry and topics of expertise and start populating your site with that.
#3 Sophisticate Your Feature Set
Since websites are more app-like than ever, you need to make sure that yours feels precisely like that. To do so, you need to refine the features on your website. Forget about the simplistic idea of creating static pages with static content – you need to go beyond that, adding features that can further engage your audience and provide a captivating and useful experience for anyone who arrives at your website.
AI-driven chatbots, interactive forms, hyper-personalized content – they all are cutting-edge features that can take your website up a notch. Basically, anything you can add to your website that feels different and provides extra value for your users will do. Keep in mind, though, that the important thing is having a smooth and pleasant user experience, so don’t ask for bells and whistles just because. A purpose-driven website is always a better choice than one that’s all about looks (besides, you can have both of those things).
#4 Test, Test, Test
You can do plenty of things to improve your website but if you don’t test your efforts and adjust accordingly, you’ll never know what worked and what didn’t. Thus, you need to measure everything you do on your website to check which of your changes has a positive impact on your traffic and engagement. Maybe you think that adding videos would be a good thing only to find out that your audience prefers a more straightforward and written communication. Those are the things you uncover by testing.
How can you do that? Constantly work on new features and changes in your website and release them “darkly”. By that, we mean launching the new version of the site to a reduced group of users who can provide feedback on the new design and functionality. This is perfect for conducting A/B testing at no cost while having the opportunity to gather valuable feedback that will lead you to more informed decisions about your site.
#5 Analytics and Business Intelligence, Your Biggest Allies
When it comes to doing all of the things above (and many others that you could do with your website), you need to start embracing analytics and business intelligence tools as integral parts of your strategy. On one hand, analytic algorithms will provide you with data to better understand your users and their behavior on your site, which will in turn uncover improvement possibilities. If you aid analytics with AI, you can automate the analysis and collect more relevant feedback as time goes by.
As for business intelligence, it comprises a wide range of tools and strategies that have one specific goal: to provide you with in-detail reports about your business and its assets. While BI certainly exceeds what you do on your website, it certainly applies to it, as you can use BI tools to gather the information you’ll later use with the analytics algorithms to better understand your audience. Besides, BI will provide you with features to granularize the information, allowing you to easily visualize the data and dissect it.
#6 The Engineering Team for a Website Boost
As basic as all of the above might seem to certain people, the reality is that those are the core elements of any successful website. Without any of those components, a website is doomed to fail, regardless of its beauty and performance. It goes without saying that, while they might feel basic, all of these points contain many possible actions and tasks that can impact your website.
Wrapping Up
How to know which ones to tackle? It’ll all depend on your overall strategy and your available resources. But if time is of the essence, then you’ll be glad to learn that BairesDev can provide you with the engineering power to make that website boost a reality in no time. Our engineers can act as the main contributors to your website’s tasks, developing solutions that enhance and revamp both the front end and back end.
This means that BairesDev’s team of the Top 1% of tech Talent can take any web development project you might have and revamp it by developing key new features, reviewing and reworking any existing code, and creating tests to ensure the overall quality. Our engineers are well-versed in software engineering, analytics, and business intelligence, and can add value to your project from the get-go.
So, if you’re struggling with a website that’s underperforming and you don’t know where to start with the adjustments, don’t hesitate to contact BairesDev. We’ll form a professional team that will work with you to take your site to the next level, be it through a reimagined UX, newly developed features, or an entire reworking.
If you enjoyed this, be sure to check out our other web development articles.
