5 Essentials for a Building an Inbound Website

Inbound is no longer a buzzword. Moving forward all businesses will need to focus on inbound marketing, particularly in creating a website built for creating highly engaged and qualified leads to the pipeline.

Building a website is tough! Most businesses outsource the task and spend thousands of dollars and lots of work hours trying to perfect their website. So, how does your team confidently build a fantastic website built for inbound traffic and leads?

Every business being unique, there is no perfect template for your build, but in this article we’ll talk about 5 website essentials you’ll need to add when building an effective inbound website.

#1 CUSTOMER CENTRIC

REMEMBER that your website is built for your customer, not to make you happy. Every aspect of your site should provide value to the customer, instead of making the mistake of talking about what YOU want to talk about. Create a purposeful site that enhances customer experience.

Write down all of the questions that your customer may be asking themselves when they come to your site and answer all of the customer questions in an accessible way. Since 80% of customers are going to make a purchase decision before talking with sales it is your job to build trust, and build it fast!

Take the fluff out of the site and focus on providing what the customer is looking for. Nobody wants to see photos of the office pet – you get the gist.

Lastly, connect to your customers with video. Let them see who you are and connect with you outside of text. Discuss important topics like pricing with a video and speak directly to the viewer. Let the potential customer know how exactly you would solve their problems, what type of problems your business is perfect for, and how WHAT THEY SHOULD EXPECT TO PAY! Covering these topics in video is more inviting than text and allows customers to see who you are, how genuine and unique your business is, and ultimately move them closer toward purchasing your product or service.

#2 ENHANCE THE USER EXPERIENCE

Set yourself apart by giving your visitors an experience that they will remember and want to return to. Think about your favorite retail store. When I was a kid, I loved going to Hollister, for example. I hardly wore the clothes. Actually, I only ever bought the cologne. Still, I loved visiting the store because of the experience. They played music that I liked! The lights were dimmed instead of blinding bright like other retailers. Even the scent in the store was unique! All of these components added up to an experience that kept me coming back, whether I was going to buy clothes or not. Make creating a unique website environment that enhances user experience into your inbound marketing website strategy and you’ll be surprised how well you inbound website converts visitors!

Your content can be dynamic, but for the purpose of building a great inbound site you MUST optimize experience that encourages engagement and drives highly qualified, well informed leads.

#3 GIVE THE CUSTOMER CONTROL

I’ll admit, there was some back forward with the team on what to title this subsection, but we landed on “give the customer control” because essentially that is what you do when you allow them to talk to you on their terms before converting the sale.

Give the customer control over what information they give to you, and when they give it to you. A great inbound website is going to provide visitors with options to choose what they would like in the next phase of their journey toward conversion. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to create forms for your customers with options to define what they would like. For example, what is their purpose for visiting? What are their interests? What role do they play in their company? These are ALL SALES QUESTIONS that the customer can provide to you before talking to a sales team member, and makes the visitor feel in control and valued through the process.

Simply put, make it easy for the potential customer to contact you. Allow the potential customer to provide information to you so that your sales team has enough information to connect with the customer immediately instead of asking stuffy sales questions.

#4 OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE FOR SEARCH

DON’T RUN AWAY! I know you hear this all the time but I promise to make this painless. Building a great inbound website inherently requires it be optimized for search engines. It doesn’t matter if you are rolling out fresh content regularly if Google and Bing aren’t sending visitors to you.

Increase traffic from search engines by using keywords that are relevant to your business topic so that search engines can see that you are an authority on the subject.

Here’s some quick tips for search optimization:

1) Regularly produce new content. Most engines are looking for frequency of website updates. Even Itunes does this by suggesting content from podcast that have uploaded new episodes with high frequency. Google wants to send you to sites that you want to visit, and so it does it’s best to find high value content from active website. Be one of those!

2) Think about your web host. Download speed is a critical component that search engines are looking for in you site before they refer visitors. Go with a host that provides high speed download times – preferably under 2 seconds. Plenty of sites exist that will test your download speeds. I’ve used webpagehost.org and it’s never fails.

3) Make your site mobile friendly! I can’t say it enough. About 40 percent of this websites traffic comes from a mobile device. More and more consumers are searching for answers to their questions directly from their phone. In the age of information your website should be optimized to provide an excellent user experience for desktop and mobile. Many websites have options to build mobile responsive pages. Take the time with your team to view the mobile layout of your website and make changes where needed to make navigating through your site and finding information easy.

4) Keep creating engaging content. The longer that visitors stay on your website, the more pages that they visit, and the more articles that they read all the way through - the higher search engines will rank your site.

As marketers, we love search engines. The search engine is our friend that sends us potential customers 24/7. Let search engines be the ultimate referrers by taking simple measures that they love and make them happy. Truthfully, search engines need to trust you before they refer traffic your way. Build that trust and you’re on the way to creating a great inbound website.

#5 THINK ABOUT YOURSELF

AHHHH! Isn’t it nice to take a break and focus on yourself!

Absolutely.

Marketers need to think about themselves when creating a great inbound website! After all, who will be maintaining the website? Who is responsible for inbound leads? Who will be creating forms, managing information, and working with the sales team? That’s right, YOU ARE!

Make it easy on yourselves by choosing an easy to use content management system (CMS). As marketers, we want to spend time engaging with customer and not trying to figure out how to custom code a web page to make it beautiful or place a button on the right margin with 25px of padding.

Two of the most popular content management systems in the world are Hubspot and WordPress. If you are starting from scratch, give these guys a looksee.

TO SUM IT ALL UP

You want to create a stunning and effective inbound website that gives the user an experience to remember and provides your marketing team with easy of use and flexibility.

Your website is your business. Is it easy to work with your business? Does your business answer questions when customers ask? Do you have positive relationships with other search engines businesses?

Let your website be a great representation of your business by providing the same service that you would if the visitor was standing right in front of you. If you can do that -you’re on your way to having a great inbound website.