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Casey Germain is an intern at Analytic-OR, completing his Business Administration degree from Holland College.  As part of his duties, he is contributing postings to the blog.

1. Start with Your Business Objectives

You should always state your business objectives. This section should include a brief overview of your business, what products and services you offer and any other business objectives or information you would like a first time visitor to your site to see. This allows people who visit your site to get a general understanding of what you offer and how it can benefit them.

2. SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of increasing traffic to your website. SEO is the process of improving your search ranking on search engines such as Google and Bing. Doing so will help increase traffic to your website, and in turn can help increase profit in your business.

3. Include Clear Contact Info

Your website should always include a clear way to contact your business. In this section you should include an address for customers who want to contact you in person, a phone number and an email address. This information should be easy to find, since a consumer doesn’t want to comb through your website searching for a way to contact you. Having an easy way for customers to contact you, and quickly replying to customer’s inquiries can help build trust with your customers, showing them that you care about providing them with top quality service.

4. Use Analytics to Measure Site Effectiveness

An extremely useful tool for your website is Google Analytics. You can use Google Analytics to gain valuable information about visitors to your website, which can give you the upper hand when determining what to include on your site. This is a good tool to utilize, since you can never know too much about your customers, and there’s also multiple articles/guides to help you get started with Google Analytics, even if you haven’t had much experience with it before.

5.  Link to Social Media

Odds are your company has a form of social media, or perhaps even multiple different ones. You should always make sure to have links to all of your social media platforms on your website. This provides customers with more ways to contact you, and can also help add to your following on social media.

6.  Your Website should be Engaging and Easy to Navigate

Your website should be designed to immediately capture the attention of visitors. While also being engaging, it needs to be simple and intuitive in the sense that the average visitor shouldn’t have any problems finding whatever it is their searching for. If your site is difficult to navigate, and visitors can’t easily find what they’re looking for, this increases the chances that they leave your website being unsatisfied, which projects a negative image upon your company.

7. Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

Statistics say that that about 80% of consumers on the internet use mobile platforms to access the web. This makes it more important than ever for your website to be mobile friendly. More and more people are accessing the internet through tablets, smart phones and other mobile platforms. Another reason your site should be mobile friendly is to accommodate Google’s most recent search engine update, which ranks mobile friendly sites higher on searches from mobile devices than ones that aren’t. So if you don’t want your search engine ranking to drop, then it may be in your best interests to invest in a mobile friendly site.

8. Plan for Updating and Keep Content Fresh

Your website is never “finished”. It’s a piece of your business that will be constantly evolving and will need to be updated often. It’s important to keep content on your website fresh, and make sure you always have current information about your business. The last thing you want is to have old, outdated information that no longer pertains to your business.

9. Make Sure Your Website is Polished and Professional Looking

Your website should reflect the image you want your business to have. Your website is often the first impression you make on possible customers, so it’s important to make that impression a good one. It should be free of any spelling or grammar mistakes, so it’s a good idea to get multiple different people to comb over your site looking for such mistakes.