Key Factors for Website Success

Clearly Define Your Goals

While we should always start a web or digital marketing project with goals, we need to consider both ourselves and the user with our website.

The site can only generate traffic, leads, and sales when we make sure we have what our target audience wants and we can deliver it for them in a satisfactory way.

Defining goals for both your organization and your user should be easy to do.

If the goals don’t align, then you’ll likely have a problem where you’ll seek to make profits yet not be able to deliver the product and experience your audience seeks.

Brand or name recognition.

When you're starting out, you won't have the advantage of a big name, unless you're successful enough to merge with an already established company. To build up your reputation, practice good business. For instance, make sure you respond to your customers' orders promptly. If you can't do it yourself, set up an autoresponder or hire a person to deal with orders. Offer rebates if the customer is dissatisfied with your product or service. Most of all, keep up a friendly persona. Generally, as the adage goes, the customer is always right. This isn't always an easy rule to live by, but it's important that a beginning business try as much as it can to observe it.

The more you do good business and the more you promote yourself, the more you'll get a name going in internet markets. The speed of information today can help or harm you. If you deliver terrible service, a blogger can write about his or her experience and within hours, your name and reputation can be decimated throughout cyberspace.

Budget Properly

Prepare to invest in your web presence. I have known a lot of brands that overspend on their sites and then go cheap on marketing. Conversely, there are those who want to go big on marketing and won’t put anything into their website.

Earn the Trust of Your Audience

Be clear and transparent in what you are offering and what you want your audience to do.



Know what motivates them and what you’re strong at.

Leverage that.

Too often, websites lack the emotional or credibility connections needed to earn trust and the lead or sale.

A prime example that I see often are ecommerce sites (and even service company websites) that lack a substantial About Us page.

Users want to know who they are doing business with and not that you’re just another commodity site in the space.

If you can’t put names, pictures, culture, philosophy, or some type of story on your website, you’ll lack the ability to state what you’re about.

Clear calls-to-action

The importance of clear calls-to-actions (CTAs) to the success of an eCommerce website cannot be overstated. To this end, a call-to-action should appear at least once on every page, whether that CTA leads customers to make a purchase or to gather more information. Your CTAs should be simple and to the point, and inspire your customers to act while also letting them know exactly where the link they’ll be clicking is taking them. There should be primary CTAs for making purchases, plus secondary CTAs leading to more information about products, services, and the company as a whole.

Find Ways to Stand Out

Differentiation is key.

You can still use a website template and look different.

By customizing imagery and styles tailoring them to your brand, you can stand out.

This goes along with earning trust.

When you tell your story and create factors like price, quality, customer service, what you do with profits, how you give back, etc., you create the bond needed to stand out from the rest of the templated and quickly spun-up sites selling the same products or services.