Our Guide for Start-Ups on Optimising Your Website for Success

Our Guide for Start-Ups on Optimising Your Website for Success

Starting a new business presents a plethora of challenges. Between securing funding, handling legal processes and developing a robust marketing strategy, there is little time to consider the finer, long-term points of promoting your start-up’s success.

Nevertheless, building a solid presence in the digital realm is practically mandatory today if start-ups want to further cultivate funding opportunities and impress potential clients/customers. As such, optimising your website to appeal to those who encounter it is essential. Remember – many people’s first impressions of your start-up will be through your website.

In order to make the process of optimising your website simpler, we’ve put together a guide that’ll help you focus and prioritise select elements early in the web design process. These tips ultimately can help ensure your website complements your start-up’s long-term success.

Enlist Professional Services

While a leader of a start-up might have exceptional business acumen and marketing experience, there’s a good chance that they are not masters of website design and maintenance. To truly optimise a web experience for start-ups, it is likely that some professional assistance will be required.

While this can require an upfront financial investment, the results are almost always more than worth it. Website design tools provide businesses and brands with exceptional web design solutions that maximise not only design but technical and structural elements as well. From ensuring mobile users can easily interact with your online presence to cultivating better digital marketing outcomes, these web design solutions can help start-ups begin with great results.

Otherwise, designing an effective website that’s optimised for success can be challenging. Start-ups in particular want to make a good first impression, so enlisting the services of those with experience is an easy choice when assessing the long-term consequences.

Understand the Tenets of SEO

There are numerous methods through which start-ups and brands can gain exposure, improve sales, and persuade audiences. Paid marketing tactics such as social media advertising can provide a quick boost of attention – but at a cost, obviously. This is why organic marketing tactics and exposure are so valuable to brands just beginning their journeys.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the process of improving websites and content so that maximum visibility in search engine results can be achieved. SEO is incredibly complex and features many elements that are both technical and aesthetic, including keyword research, link building and user experience.

One of the most common sets of strategies for optimising an existing website – or even deploying a new one – is rooted in an understanding of SEO.

Have a Marketing Plan

As mentioned, there are numerous forms of marketing available to start-ups that can drive traffic and increase engagement. Whether it be social media marketing, email marketing or search engine marketing, most ad campaigns have a common goal: drive traffic to the start-up’s website and convince audiences to engage in one or more behaviours.

This is why the need for a marketing plan is so crucial to website optimisation. Many forms of marketing point users to what are known as landing pages. These pages are generally stand-alone entities on your website dedicated to a specific task, action, product or service. It is important to understand the value of landing pages in order to get the most out of both your website and marketing plans.

Additionally, incorporating elements into landing pages that encourage further engagement with your website (such as recommended posts, FAQs, links to podcasts, etc.) is essential to further optimising website performance.

Carefully Consider Website Design

Whether a start-up already has an initial website or is deploying one for the first time, the concept of web design is always a popular topic. It should not be surprising – especially with the role that user experience can play in success – that design is integrated with start-up web success. Optimising this element is therefore critical.

Some elements that must be carefully considered include fonts, headings and subheadings, colours and link placement. A comprehensive website design plan should be sketched out before any changes to an existing website or deployment of a new website occur.

Deploy Efficient Navigational Elements

One of the most fundamental aspects of a properly optimised website is navigation. Regardless of how people arrive, start-ups – just like any other business or brand – have a vested interest in maximising on-site time and convincing visitors to explore. If navigational elements such as links and menus are sparse or otherwise difficult to find, this harms that goal.

Additionally, dynamics such as search engine optimisation are impacted by the quality of navigational elements. Not only do links affect SEO, but so does the ease at which search engine crawlers and bots can navigate the structure of your website (both through standard navigational elements and through site maps). There are dozens of optimisations that start-ups can make to a new or existing website, but few have such an impact as the aforementioned elements. By enlisting professional services, understanding SEO, using ample navigational elements, strategizing the website design process and utilising sound marketing techniques to drive traffic, any start-up’s website performance can be drastically enhanced.