Whatever your business is, your potential clients need to get that instant feel good first impression.

A professional looking website builds trust.

It shows you’ve invested in your site, it shows you do what a potential client thinks you do and that you do it well by providing examples of your work and testimonials.

It’s rare someone lands on your site by accident. They are most likely a hot lead who are after your services, products or information.

They may have arrived via word of mouth, a directory listing or a Google search.

Rightly or wrongly, your website, in your potential clients eyes, is a direct reflection of your business.

You may be the best builder, electrician or hair salon going, but if your website isn’t looking professional, people have to assume that isn’t the case.

Websites should always be intuitive for your potential clients to use.

Most people browse the internet these days and they have expectations of how things work.

Navigation should be simple to use, links should be highlighted, contact details should be easy to find.

Your website should be mobile friendly / responsive. Most people access the majority of websites on their phone these days so you have to ensure that your website is optimised for mobile devices.

Also I cannot stress this point enough. You must tell people what it is you do immediately.

Let’s assume you run a building company which is called John & Sons.

Imagine if I land on your website and the first thing I see is a really great logo with the company name and a picture of a house that you’ve recently built.

Now those things are all ambiguous and you’re leaving me guessing what it is that you might do.

Far better to include some text such as:

John & Sons are a building company based in Reading. Berkshire.

As I’ve previously said, people rarely come to your site by accident, so make sure you immediately confirm that they are in the right place.

Of course when it comes to keeping your website up to date, you need it to be easy and intuitive for you to use.

Who enjoys sitting down and battling with their website CMS (Content Management System) every time?

Websites are as complicated as the developer makes them and boy can they be complicated.

On the flip side, an intuitive CMS along with training and ongoing support, makes you want to generate that all important content.

This is all too common nowadays.

My clients tell me they’ve spent X on content creation and ads but don’t have any hard data to show that’s been money well spent.

Of course they are frustrated. Who wouldn’t be!

However all of these things are trackable and reportable.

Please stop spending your money if that’s not the case.

If you do have some data, please bear in mind that quantity of traffic is not the best indicator of a successful online presence.

We always want quality over quantity because this generates more engagement, better leads, and increased revenue.

Unfortunately that’s just not the case.

Websites, successful ones, require ongoing efforts.

You must keep adding fresh content.

That could be case studies, blog articles, new pages etc.

It is definitely a marathon as opposed to a sprint, particularly when we are talking about organic traffic through high Google rankings.

The good news is very few will sustain this effort so by being persistent and patient, you can outrank your competition.

And remember, few people feel they have anything to write. But you are the expert in your industry.

Take some photos on your phone and create some case studies.

Give away some free advice and tips that you know people will genuinely appreciate.

The below is a good checklist of some small things that can make a big difference.

• Make sure you have an SSL certificate.
• Make sure your contact details are displayed prominently.
• Make sure you have a favicon.
• You have an email address that ties in with your domain, so john@plumber.com as opposed to john@hotmail.com.
• Generate and submit your sitemaps to Google.
• Test your forms so that you know they are capturing the correct data and are being delivered to the correct email address.
• Check all of your links work.

And please ensure your site is not being hidden from search engines!

I have seen this on a few websites. There is a little snippet of code or sometimes an option within your CMS that allows you to stop search engines such as Google from crawling your site.

If this is on, then Google doesn’t even know your website exists, regardless of how much work and effort you have been putting into your site.