What makes a website successful in 2022?

Every small business owner wants their website to be perfect. The truth is no website is perfect. But it can be successful if you put in the work and continuously tweak, polish, test, and improve it to provide a great experience to your visitors. When you have a high-quality and up-to-date website, you can more easily draw new people to your business and entice them to come back and buy from you.

Whether you’re looking to start creating a small business site or improve your existing one this year, here are the key elements that your website can’t be without in 2022.

Content that tells a compelling story

Your website should tell the story of what your business does, why it exists, who it serves, and why your prospects should care. How do you tell your story? With high-quality, relevant, and engaging content.

When you have well-written content on your site, visitors can clearly understand what you do and how your products and services can help them to achieve their goals or solve their problems.

If you also optimise your content for search engines (and you definitely should), Google can reward you with higher rankings. This means that more people will be able to find your business and offering at the top of the search engines results and feel compelled to visit your site.

So, in 2022, focus on creating high-quality, purposeful, and properly optimised content that can entice prospects to choose you over your competitors.

Read these posts to learn how to create relevant and correctly optimised content for your site:

1) How to find your target audience and create content they care about

2) Six SEO beginner tips to boost your website’s visibility in the search engine results

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Readability, grammar, and spelling

No matter how fantastic your site looks, people won’t trust it if it’s filled with jargon, poor grammar, or spelling errors. And if people don’t trust it, they won’t buy from you.

So, make sure your content is easy to read and understand. Use short sentences and simple words to ensure anyone who visits your site can quickly scan your content and understand what your business is about.

Use free tools like the Hemingway Editor and Grammarly to check and improve your content’s readability and grammar.

Strong calls to action

A call to action (CTA) is text or a button that prompts visitors to take a specific action. CTAs help to guide people to the next step you want them to take.

Your CTA can be to ask people to buy a product or service, fill out a call-back form, book an appointment, ask for a cost estimate, subscribe to your newsletter, and more.

So, in 2022, make sure you have a single yet enticing CTA on every page of your site. But, most importantly, make sure it’s relevant and useful for your visitors. Your audience may be more web-savvy than you think and might avoid filling out forms and sharing personal information unless they’re sure it’ll get them closer to solving their problems.

Learn more about calls to action and how to create powerful ones to entice more visitors to take the next step on your site.

Quality visuals

Images and videos are great. They help us to imagine owning and using a product or service so we’re more likely to purchase something that we can see. So, in 2022, make sure you include images and videos on every page of your site to display your offering in the best possible light. Be careful not to use too many though as it can make your site too busy or slow to load.

Check out these photography tactics that you can use to present your products and services to potential customers.

Simple navigation

In 2022, a successful website is one that’s easy to use. So, whether your navigation menu is located at the top of your site or in a sidebar, visitors need to spot it right away and use it to quickly find what they’re looking for.

It’s no easy task to figure out how to structure your navigation menu and the categories it will contain. But there are a couple of questions you can answer to help you come up with a clean, simple to use navigation menu:

• What broad categories of products and/or services do you sell?
• What do those products or services cost?
• If you have a physical store, where is it located and what are its hours of operation?
• How can people buy from you and what forms of payment do you accept?
• How can people contact you?

These are often the questions that a new visitor asks when they first arrive on your site. So make sure your navigation menu reflects that.

Easy access to help

No matter how clear and informative your content is, there are times when your customers want to connect with a person. Make sure your contact information is easy to find so people don’t have to hunt for it. In fact, if there’s one thing that makes people feel uneasy about a business, it’s difficult to find (or missing) contact information.

So, if you want your website to be successful in 2022 and beyond, make sure to include the various ways for people to connect with you via phone, email, live chat, and social media. Giving them different options to contact you is a great way to build trust and a lasting relationship with prospects and customers.

Reviews and testimonials

Showcasing customer reviews and testimonials, awards you’ve received, or logos of other businesses you’ve worked with can help to boost your credibility and entice more people to buy from you.

So, to be successful in 2022, you need to encourage more customers to leave a testimonial of their experience with your business. Then showcase those testimonials on your site where visitors can’t miss them – on your homepage, on your product and services page, and on your about page.

Gathering reviews and testimonials should be part of your ongoing content building efforts. Read this post for some tips and advice on how to use social proof, including customer testimonials and reviews, to boost sales.

Security

These days, it’s easy to see if your connection to a website is secure or not. It says so in the browser.

If your site doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it may put off visitors . So, in 2022, if you want to keep them on your site and buying from you, you need to secure your site and reassure visitors that whatever information they share with you, it’s kept safe and secure. An SSL is only one part of website security, so although it’s important to have one, it isn’t enough on its own.

Learn more about what makes a website secure and consider purchasing an SSL certificate to keep your visitors and business reputation safe.

Wrapping up

There are lots of other things that can help make your website successful in 2022. But the ones included in this article are critical to making a positive impression this year and enticing visitors to buy from you, come back, and recommend you to others. So, make sure you do your best to implement as many of these key elements as you can.