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7 Characteristics of an Effective Corporate or Brand Website: A Guide for Businesses
Last Updated: Jan 1, 2024
In today's world, an online presence is crucial for businesses and brands. Looking for an answer? Want to do some due diligence on a business or person? Search on Google! That is usually the first reaction.
So when your potential customers are looking for answers, will you have your company website or brand website ready and appearing on search results? If someone is looking up information about you or your business, don’t you want to have a say in what is said and prevent misinformation?
This is where having your own website becomes indispensable.
However, creating an effective company or brand website involves some considerations beyond just designing a good looking website. In this article, we look into seven characteristics that we consider essential in maximising the effectiveness of your website.
1. Strategic Website Address
Your website’s address is your digital handshake, setting the tone for a professional or commercial interaction. Thus, strategically choosing your domain name is imperative. Effective website domain names are clear, memorable and easy to enter in the address bar. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to find your name on the internet so try to make your website address as short as possible without losing the brand’s identity. Special characters such as hyphens should be avoided as these characters make it confusing and easy to type the address wrongly.
You can also consider adding a key word into your domain name to help with getting picked up by search engines when someone searches for the word. So if you were a dentistry practice, you may want to add the word “dentists” somewhere in your domain name. Or if you are targeting clients in a particular area, having the city name somewhere in your domain name helps with getting picked up by search engines. Be creative but have these considerations in mind to make your website more effective.
2. Content that Establishes Credibility
According to Forbes, “having a website is an opportunity to make a great first impression and give people comfort that you're a real business”. An effective company website or brand website recognises the opportunity to make a strong first impression and demonstrate to their prospects that they are a legitimate business.
You should therefore consider adding information that helps to establish credibility on your company website or brand website. For example, you can publish information on when your company was established, past track records, achievements and testimonials from customers. If you are selling products on your webpage, having proof widgets for every sale made is also an effective way to establish credibility and excitement to also buy.
3. Clear Solutions Are Communicated
An effective company website or brand website communicates the solution to the visitor's problem clearly. Effective websites excel in letting readers understand what is offered and what they will receive if they transact with the business.
You should therefore strive to publish content which is logical, ethical and develops affinity with the business. The good news is that persuasive content does not have to be long-winded so you do not have to spend more time working on it than you should.
In fact, if you can communicate the solution in lesser words the better! If you cannot communicate the gist of your offer within one minute or less, then you should reconsider making your propositions more concise. The focus should be quality over quantity in solving issues or problems faced by your customer.
4. Integrity In Presentation
This is an important copywriting consideration. Whether you like it or not, the website visitor assesses the integrity of the company or brand behind the website when they view the content.
Does the website look tacky and exaggerates its content? Or is the website neat, tidy and is fair in presenting the information?
Effective company websites and brand websites lean towards the latter as they strive for professional, honest and ethical representations. The goal is to create legitimate business relations so integrity is a central characteristic of effective websites.
5. Website Is Optimised For Mobile Devices
Is your website mobile friendly?
Mobile-optimised websites is a factor that Google considers when assessing your site and listing it in their search results. A mobile friendly website will therefore enjoy better rankings on search engines. This is understandable because these days because search engines recognise that people are constantly consuming information on their mobile devices so websites that display properly across mobile devices such as phones and tablets are more desirable as they provide a better user experience on their search platform.
Due to the smaller screen width, the order of how the elements on the page appear on mobile devices will differ from viewing on a desktop. Therefore, having a website builder software that allows you to easily optimise the webpage for mobile devices will be an advantage so that you can ensure that your website displays exactly the way that you want it to display on mobile devices.
6. Analytics & Widgets: Insights and Engagement
Effective websites usually have additional third party applications called widgets embedded onto the page which enhances the user experience.
An example of a widget is a Tidio chat widget where you can send a chat message to the website’s owner if you have a question that you need answered. A chat widget enhances the engagement that your potential customer has on your website and is a powerful tool that lets you address any of your customer's questions about your offered product or services in real time.
If you are running paid traffic to your website, the chatbox widget lowers your costs per acquisition of a customer as the chatbox allows you to address any concerns that a customer may have about your offer by sending you a message. This improves the chances of closing the deal and minimising your costs of running retargeting campaigns to address those concerns and doubts.
For example, one of our customers had an issue with a payment checkout and started a chat to ask us to provide a checkout link so they could pay us. The chat box was instrumental in saving the sale! Could you be missing out on sales because of this? This is something to think about.
If you wanted to maximise the traffic on your website, you could also add a share widget where website visitors who found your content useful can easily share the webpage on their social channels and communication channels such as via Facebook or e-mail.
Further, an effective website has the ability to analyse and gain insights on the activity that visitors have taken on their website such as view their content, initiate a checkout of a product and when the visitor makes a purchase. These are useful features to have as a business to understand and audit how well the website is doing.
7. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
An effective website is optimised for search engines. Whilst there’s no direct control over how a search engine ranks your website since the search engine has its own internal processes and algorithms, an effective website does all that is within its control to maximise its chances of getting found by search engines.
Thus, effective websites work on factors that can help improve rankings of a website for SEO such as improving the webpage loading speed, optimising image and video sizes to display with optimal resolutions and creating content with strategic key words. SEO takes trial and error but websites that constantly work on this have a competitive advantage over their competitors in terms of visibility in the marketplace.
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About Ron & Sound The Core
Ron is the founder of the company Sound The Core which consults startups, entrepreneurs and businesses on websites, online sales processes, digital marketing, webinars, presentation skills and copywriting.
The company regularly builds professional websites and is passionate about the fundamental skills to do so because website building is the building block to setting up more advanced marketing and business solutions such as automated online sales processes and marketing funnels.
Additionally, Ron is dual qualified in commerce (B.Com) and law (LL.B). The principles and trainings by Sound The Core are inspired by marketing, copywriting, presentations, legal advocacy and negotiations knowledge and training.
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