There are literally thousands of ways to ruin a website. A website can be beautiful, perfectly branded and use all the latest browser technology—and yet still suck in a profusion of ways. Let’s examine a few favorites.
Topping the list is a website that’s too slow to load. Not only will your slow loading website turn away visitors at a rate of about 12% for every second you make them wait—you’ll also be signaling search engines that your website offers a poor user experience. As a rule, a bad user experience equals bad rankings.
Next up, your website has to be mobile friendly. All major search engines place priority on a website’s mobile experience over the desktop. And for good reason. Over two thirds of online searches are mobile. Desktops don’t even make up the remaining third.
Coming in at number three—hard to find contact info. There’s no point putting time and energy into the perfect web experience if your website visitors can’t figure out how to contact you. Put contact info on every page, and encourage users to reach out to you using whatever method they prefer. Forcing visitors to fill out a web form might just force them to look for somewhere else to do business.
Perhaps more important than being easy to contact is giving your visitors a reason to contact you. Not providing enough information on your website encourages your visitors to continue doing research. In the end, they’ll probably choose a competitor that provides lots of details about their company and the products and services they offer.
Finally, it is impossible to overstate the importance of organic search engine rankings. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of making your website content the best candidate for coveted top spots in Google among others. Earning the number one position for the right keywords is a competitive advantage you can’t achieve any other way.
To recap, your website should;
