What Makes A Good Website?
Most websites are built to attract potential customers follow three basic principles. Does your site follow these?
With over eight billion searches every day, and more and more people looking online for information about the products and services they need, just simply having a website isn’t enough. To be able to cut through the clutter and turn visitors into customers, you need a site that follows the key elements of what turns a good website into a site built for conversions.
So, what key elements make a website both great and built to convert? A well-built site is functional, has a crisp, eye-catching design and is structured to capture lead information and persuade visitors to get in touch.
What Makes A Website Functional?
Website functionality is a pretty simple topic. Does your website provide users with the information they are looking for in a manner that is responsive and easy to navigate? If so, then the site is functional. Below are some things to keep in mind when judging website functionality.Does the website provide relevant information?
People appreciate websites that offer the information they are looking for without having to jump through hoops to reach it. Customers are able to easily find what they are looking for if you have service pages, about and contact buttons in the header of your website. The information on these pages should clearly communicate what services your business provides, what the process is like, and how interested customers should get in contact with you.For home service providers, one of the easiest ways to leverage your website’s content to provide relevant information is to build out “city pages” for your service areas.
Building out specific pages for each city in your service area can also help you reach your other digital marketing efforts. You can use these as landing pages for search advertising campaigns that are connected to the location, or you can leverage these city pages for search engine optimization efforts, helping your website rank higher on search engines’ results pages no matter where your customers are within your search area.
Is the site technically savvy and up-to-date?
Without the backend side of your site properly set up, it will not perform to its fullest. Important technical factors such as load speed and security play a major role in the functionality of your site.
One of the biggest reasons that visitors and potential customers quickly exit a site is that the load speed is too slow. Studies have shown that users are ready to leave a site and look for another information source if it does not load within two seconds.
Security also plays a major role in the functionality of your site. If your site is not properly secure, some browsers such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari will not let the user even access the site. A security site will protect and encrypt the data of its users so that they are not at risk of cyber attacks. Having a valid security sockets layer, or SSL, installed on your website can help protect users.
Other technical factors to consider are the SEO elements that also affect how your site ranks. Meta titles, or the coded titles of your pages, serve as descriptors for Google’s indexing bots.
Meta descriptions, or code with information about the page, provide the indexing bots with some insight into what it should be looking for while crawling the page. Alternate image tags, or a short code describing the contents of an image or video, are extremely useful in conveying information to Google about an SEO-rich source like photos and videos.
You most likely already know how important keywords are when it comes to building optimized web pages. Making sure that all tags, pages and titles are using the proper keywords can be the difference between a site that appears on the first page of the search results, and a site that appears on the seventh page. When Google crawls your website it utilizes all of these elements to determine how relevant your site is to a user’s search query.
Is the website optimized for mobile and tablet browsing?
With almost 60 percent of all web traffic coming from mobile devices (Exploding Topics, 2022), the days of having a site not built for mobile are well in the past. A well-built website will have a responsive design, so that the layout and look of the site changes to provide the user with the best experience for their device.
Another important reason to have a mobile-friendly site is that Google’s algorithm for ranking search results crawls and indexes mobile site versions first. When building a new site from scratch, it can be a smart idea to begin with the mobile version, as this is the one that visitors will usually be interacting with. Most major website building platforms like Duda and Wordpress have a dynamic site display format built into the design software.
Does the website design grab your attention?
Customers are more likely to call or fill out a form on a site that is visually pleasing than either a bland or over designed site. You can usually spot an attractive website instantly due to crisp colors, images or fonts, but if you take a closer look you can see the graphic design principles that make it appealing.
Good web design follows basic graphic design principles. The main principle of graphic design is hierarchy, the importance of controlling certain design elements and conveying them in a certain order of importance.
Are you consistent across your site?
Consistency is key in website design. Using the same colors, fonts, and sizes across your site establishes credibility and lends a sense of professionalism and authority to your site. It also makes it easier for the user to comprehend the material they are looking at if it is presented in a uniform fashion.
Does your site follow color theory?
A major part of design is color theory, which basically boils down to the idea that certain colors match well with each other. The human eye is very perceptive to these pairings, and we are naturally attracted to pairings that work well together.
There are many different color schemes you can use to grab viewers’ attention. Some of the most popular color schemes include monochromatic, which focuses on utilizing the different shades of one color, complimentary, which uses two colors that work well together, and triadic, which uses three colors that are often on different ends of the color wheel.
Is your website ADA compliant?
The Americans with Disabilities Act ensures that all Americans have equal access to various aspects of life regardless of if they have a disability or not. When businesses shift from an in-person to online storefront, this means your website needs to be ADA compliant.
For a website to be ADA compliant it needs to adapt to the needs of a visitor who requires a different view. This can range from contrasting colors that make copy easier to read to text-to-speech functions. An ADA compliant website means there is more of the market for you to reach, which in turn means more possible profitability for your business.
Are you using your site as a sales funnel?
At the end of the day, your website needs to serve a purpose in your overall marketing strategy to help you achieve your goals. Your main goal is most likely to get more leads, so you need to think of your website as the final part of a funnel that takes potential customers from the internet and turns them into leads and actual customers.
Having the proper systems and processes in place to drive conversions is critical to having a great website. Below are some tips and tricks to help your website drive leads.
Are you using calls to action?
A website serves as a source of information for visitors who are interested in learning more about either your company or the products and services you provide. Take advantage of that interest and urge them to get in touch. Your website experience should lead customers to your contact points and subliminally persuade them to take a desired action like calling or filling out a form.
For example, imagine a customer wants to learn more about metal roofing options near them. They click onto a website from either an ad or an organic result, and they arrive at a landing page about metal roofing specifically built for their city. On this page they find all of the information about the types of metal roofs available, the average lifespan, and what the company’s installation process looks like.
Throughout the article there have been links to the contact us page, sentences highlighting their free estimate offer, and other call to action items. When the customer either reaches the bottom of the page or scrolls back to the top, they notice a form with another “get a free quote” message. They fill it out. This customer visit has resulted in a lead for your business because of your call to action.
Are you consistently improving your site’s SEO?
The internet is constantly changing and to keep your site ranking higher on search engines, you need to have a plan to work on search engine optimization, or SEO. This plan should include all of the technical SEO features discussed in the functionality portion but also the other aspects that tie it all together.
Make a plan to consistently create relevant and useful content that will attract users to your site. Not only does this allow you to add keywords to your site, but these informational bits can be shared across multiple digital marketing channels. Blog posts can be repurposed for email marketing messages or social media posts, which in turn can be used as part of the funnel to drive customers to your site and get in contact with you.
Does your website’s forms capture the correct information?
Something to avoid is for a customer to find all of the information they need on your site, go to get in contact with you through a form, and then the page’s form does not require the necessary information. Having a form that captures the right kind of information not only makes the user experience more seamless and the buyer's journey more pleasant but also makes your life easier when reaching out to the customer.
Most forms should require basic information like name, address, phone and email, and service required. When dealing with forms on specialized services pages such as a form on a roof installation page, you can begin to ask for more specific information such as age of roof or if the customer is interested in a shingle or metal roof.

Is your site built to turn visitors into customers?
If anything on this list stood out to you as something you feel could be improved on your website, it is worth looking into a fix. Aletheia Digital offers SEO packages structured to help improve your site’s functionality by monitoring web health vitals such as page load speed, site security, URL structure, Search Console page indexing and more. We can also help you leverage your site for content marketing purposes such as blogs, vlogs and content tag optimizations designed to help you rank higher across search engines.
For more information about why your business needs a website, or what you can do to improve your current one, click here .
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Aletheia Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency providing creative marketing solutions to home
service providers and other business owners to help them grow their business. With office locations in
Columbus, Georgia, and Wichita, Kansas, Aletheia Digital works with companies and contractors
throughout the United States and Canada. Aletheia Digital offers products, services and consulting
expertise in the realms of website design, paid digital advertising, search engine optimization, etc. to
businesses looking to conquer the digital marketing landscape.
