How to create a professional website?

Why create a professional website?

To be displayed on the web is essential in order to be known, to communicate efficiently and to optimize your business. The creation of a website is more than a simple commercial method aiming to make a company known on the French, European and even international market.

A professional website can easily influence the way your customers and your market see your company. First impressions are essential and your website should allow you to meet several goals

• Generating trust
• Implementing credibility
• Engaging Internet users
• Generating leads
• Simplify sales
• Supporting clients

In France alone, there are more than 3.5 million websites, less than 10% of which offer online sales. Unfortunately, many business leaders go online with few ideas and strategies on how their site will impact customer acquisition, lead generation and brand reputation.

Creating a professional website is therefore useless without any clear goals and strategies that can help you ensure the proper development of your business.

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The essential steps to follow to create a professional website:

• Setting up an online presence

For service companies, setting up a presence on the Internet is the most effective way to give legitimacy, offering your target a reference point that they can discover at any time.

For start-ups, the website allows you to design the feasibility of the project and can allow you to perform an MVP of your product/service to recognize the reaction of your target and thus maximize your marketing.

Nowadays, online business is an integral part of successful business development. This is also true for a well established small company website which represents an incredible opportunity.

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• Providing information

It is obvious that customers and prospects have questions about your offer and ask for a demonstration. A professional website is a very effective tool to meet these expectations.

• The visualization of all your offers and the detailed description of their functionalities reassure the visitors of all your products/services.
• The presentation of solutions allows prospects to project themselves by discovering how your customers have appropriated your offers.
• The creation of the “Who we are” page effectively reassures visitors about the credibility of your approach.
• The FAQ concerns all your prospects close to the act of purchase in order to reassure them and deal with objections.
• The creation of a blog allows you to provide quality information and to answer precisely to the target’s numerous questions. This step also makes it possible to make Internet users discover your company, since your products answer concerns that concern them.

• Generate leads and sales

A professional website is a real commercial lever that helps you generate leads and sales for your company.

If you are here, it is because you have certainly learned how the sales process works: communicating in order to reach your target, adapting your sales pitch, proposing accelerators or offers, generating prospective contacts, communicating with them in order to convince them and transform them into customers.

Whatever your profession, your website will allow you to define your sales indicators (know the site’s audience, know the rate of prospects/visits, measure the rate of transformation of prospects into potential customers…).

If years ago, commerce was still a difficult operation, today, with logistics and online payment to be integrated into a website, this is now a thing of the past. Thanks to your professional website, you will be able to connect a module in order to have an online payment tool, a planning management tool (a sports coach website for example), an online booking tool (a hotel website for example) and much more.

Professional website: essential ease of use

Creating an effective professional website implies taking into consideration certain principles:

• In more than 50% of the cases, the Internet user navigates from his smartphone; the format adapted to these media is therefore mandatory.
• The Internet user wants quick access to information. In just a few seconds, he will scan the page on which his search engine takes him.
• An HTTPS URL for more security
• The company logo allows you to return to the home page.
• The menu or navigation bar is at the top of the page.
• Pages load in less than 3 seconds so they can be displayed even with a 3G connection.

What really matters to users?

During the creation of your professional website, you can ask your customers or partners for feedback on how they perceive the ease of use of your site.

Following the publication of your showcase site, you have the possibility to analyse the behaviour of all your users in order to detect misunderstandings. To start, a reading of your Google Analytics tool can help you detect problems.

Be aware that the effectiveness of your website depends a lot on the way it is designed. If you use a web agency, your website will undoubtedly be more efficient thanks to the strategy put in place before its creation.

And what about SEO?

Your professional site will be well referenced if it meets the requirements of search engines. This is not magic; these are robots that analyze web pages to detect information so they can understand what they are about.

SEO experts will all tell you the same thing: SEO is a process that requires time, method and is based on 4 phases :

• Understanding the way Internet users do their searches: which keywords are typed on search engines? Some keywords may be far from the act of buying, however, being identified there allows you to make a name for yourself with prospects at the beginning of their decision process.
• Integrate keywords in the right places: each web page is summarized by a title and a description (meta title and meta description). This is what Internet users see first in search engine results. During a website audit, it is also the first element that SEO experts will analyze. Each title and description of each page must integrate keywords to allow Google to understand the specific objectives and present them to the right people.
• Animate your professional website: prospects want up-to-date information and search engines highlight recent information, therefore, you need to animate your website. This is the interest of having a blog that allows you to create new content and enrich your site. The ideal would be to publish a page of at least 300 words each week and make it known via social networks.
• Working on backlinks: this is the most important step in any natural SEO process. Your e-commerce site or showcase site is now rich in content, frequently animated, and it is then more and more visited. This is therefore the time to identify the websites with which it is essential to enter into contact in order to propose an exchange of links. Each site has a page rank and the challenge is to acquire backlinks from sites with a page rank higher than yours.

 If you don’t know which type of website best suits your business, check out our article to find out which type of website to choose.

Do not hesitate to call upon our services of creation of window/institutional website or e-commerce website for a high quality result adapted to the specificities of your company. If you already have a website think about asking us for a SEO audit to help you improve it.