Top 12 Essential Features Of A Business Website

“A website is the central avenue that encourages brand value, marketing, and business operations at the same time!”

Every business needs a website to mark its digital footprint and impress its customers. Websites are the frontier of brand awareness, marketing campaigns, and running all your business operations in one place. They are the hub of user engagement and interaction no matter the scale of the business.

However, business websites must include features and functionalities that lays the framework for a successful business site.

Here is the list of crafted strategies and features to make a small business grow digitally

Mobile Responsive Layout

In today’s digital space, smartphones play a major role in establishing a brand and business. There are trillions of smartphone users accessing the digital world. To avail this opportunity you need a mobile-friendly website.This functionality will enable your website to be accessed from any device and fit on any screen (mobile phones, laptops, tablets, desktops, etc). It also creates more traction and helps you with your brand awareness.

Major search engines like Google also include mobile responsiveness as a ranking factor with fully optimized designs for mobile platforms. Studies have shown more than 60% of the search inquiries are done from mobile devices which is a valuable factor for SERP as well. Make your business platform adaptive with any website design and development service provider to attract the attention of your potential clients.

Effortless User Navigation

Your website’s navigation should be an effortless journey for all your users and web visitors. Poor website navigation can turn off your potential customers to jump ship. You need to create an easy navigation flow that –

• Mitigates clutter
• Has a drop-down menu to organize internal links and web pages
• Build user-friendly website so that it can be accessed by the audiences.
• Distinguishable buttons to navigate the browsing journey seamlessly

The ultimate sophistication of any brand and business website lies upon the user navigation. A simple, effortless, and quick journey for all your target audience to make them aware of what you have to offer.

Accessible Contact Information

Ensure that your business website contains all the necessary contact information that your web visitors and users may need to communicate with you. Update your contact details and ensure that it can be accessed by your target audiences. Putting contact information in the footer makes it more obvious and visitors do not need to search for them. “Make a Contact Us” Page where your audiences can easily find the relevant information. If the potential clients are unable to reach out to you, they may end up going to your competitor’s website instead.

SEO Optimized Web Pages

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can help your business grow organically.A flashy presence will only take you so much further the line, but SEO elements are the right hand in establishing your digital footprint. SEO is essential for-

• Digital marketing
• Content Marketing
• Social media marketing
• Brand awareness
• Boosting ranks
• User engagement rate
• Drives traffic to your business website
• Generate quality lead
• Enhance conversions

Some of the best SEO-powered practices are-

• Leveraging SEO-friendly URLs
• Backlinking
• Adding modifiers in your title
• Use header tags in your content
• Wrap H1 for title and H2 for subheadings
• Enticing snippet
• Use keywords
• Utilize outbound links
• Improve the website’s loading speed and time
• Optimize all the images on your site
• Enable social sharing buttons

Updated Digital Contents

Your business website should always provide a fresh perspective to all visitors and users. Putting fresh, updated, consistent content on your website will drive more traffic and user engagement on your site. You can establish your brand presence, guide the users about your product/services offered, and boost conversions. A periodical post will keep your potential customers in the loop and drive a purchasing decision.

Add blogs, posts, social media links, optimized images, videos, carousels, gifs, reels, and so on to engage your audience. Take time, utilize resources, add visual elements and invest in your business website. Rich SEO-friendly content which is responsive will make you stand out from your rival brands.

Social Media Presence

Social media channels play a huge role in promoting your brand and business online. It has millions of active users daily that can generate quality leads and conversions. All your social media handles should maintain some following work to get the right amount of engagement-

• A fresh and updated content strategy that links your website to show activeness online
• Consistent and periodic posting of contents
• Showcase your feed or post directly on your website to make your users aware of your social media pages
• Put up-to-date social media icons with proper visibility
• Enable social media sharing buttons on your website so that our web visitors can share your product/service seamlessly

Security

It is essential that as a business owner you keep the information of your customer secure and protected. Your business website should do the same for all the web visitors and customers that are engaging on your page.

Ensure that your website is SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certified and compliant. It is an added layer of security that encrypts the link between the web server and browser. This way all information stays well protected and does not fall into the hands of hackers.

You can understand if a website is SSL certified by looking at the padlock in the address bar given before the website’s URL. The HTTPS padlock represents that a website is secured and protected from hacking.

Testimonials & Feedbacks

Putting up testimonials from your customers on your business website can-

• Influences your brand image and goodwill
• Establishes trust and credibility for your work
• Proves the brand validity and recognition
• Humanizes the brand and business online
• Creates strong social proof for further projects
• Fastracks purchase decision

This is a very bold strategic move that you can implement to acquire more customers in the future. Allocating a web page for customer testimonial and reviews are beneficial for your business. They are the first-hand proof and experience of your business operations.

Placement of Brand Logo

The brand logo is very niche in making your users aware of your brand and business. The logo of your brand is the very soul of your business visions and objectives. It depicts the brand image and value on every channel and platform. A remarkable brand logo can establish your brand’s digital footprint by grasping the target audience’s attention. The positioning of your logo is also crucial for your user’s journey. The brand logo should be placed at the top left of your website where it is visible to all your users at a glance.

FAQ Web Page

Frequently Asked Questions or FAQ web pages are an added layer of benefit that will influence user engagement. FAQ web pages are mainly built to feed additional information to all your site visitors and clients about the business. An effective FAQ page educates, informs, and guides all web visitors. Some of the elements that you can include on your FAQ page-

• You can list the major questions and answers you receive from your audience every day
• Try to keep the FAQ web page fresh, sorted and simple to navigate
• You can match your FAQs with commonly asked questions which ranks them organically.

Domain Name

Domain names for your website represent who you are as a brand, what is your product/service, and your goals. Try to select domain names for your business website that bring out your offered niche in the market, are easy to write, and should end with .in or .com. There are a lot of websites from where you can purchase domain names and check the availability too. Domain names should not be exaggerated, hyphenated, or difficult to spell out. They should always be-

• Short
• Easy to spell
• Easy to remember
• Is a representative of your website/brand/business

Page Footer

Web page footers are essential for business websites and guide the browsing pattern of web visitors. You can use navigation buttons and menus to make the user experience more seamless. They are a very small detail of your business website but can do more than what they seem.

While a user browses a web page and comes to the last of the content on a web page, the page footer tells them exactly where they are. They also help in browsing more content as the user does not have to go to the top of the page again to browse more.

To conclude,

These are some of the essentials of a business website that are fundamental for its seamless working. They make your website more effective, and effortless and offer a straightforward user experience. The balance of all these elements can put you in the limelight and boost conversions eventually. You can launch your business website showcasing your products and services to your target audience and start growing your business strategically.