The Three Pillars of Website Success

So what makes a website successful?

First you need to define what website success means in your business:

• The volume of sales through your site?
• The number of people signing up to your newsletter or downloading your eBook?
• The number of people visiting your site and becoming aware of your brand?
• Or more likely, a combination of different factors?

Now you know what success looks like, there are various elements that you need to consider and that contribute to ensuring you achieve that success. This article provides some website success tips to think about.

Elements are broadly categorised into 3 key pillars. If any of these pillars are not working for you, your website will not achieve the success it could; it’s as simple as that.

A helpful way to think about this is to consider what happens if one leg of a 3 legged stool falls off … the stool falls over. And yet with 3 legs it is incredibly stable and therefore successful in achieving what it sets out to achieve.

 Pillar 1: Meeting you and your customer’s objectives

This pillar is all about ensuring you are positioning your business and services correctly and clearly.

• Do your visitors understand what it is that you do?
• Can they find what they are looking for when they visit your site?
• Is it clear why you are better than your competitors?

This pillar fundamentally concerns the strategic side of your business, your brand, your competitors, your target audiences, and your website design and positioning

Pillar 2: Making sure your targeted customers can find you

Pillar 2 concerns ensuring your site attracts visitors. This may be from the search engines, or from other tactics such as email marketing, online advertising, or affiliate marketing.

• Are you indexed in the search engines?
• How are your pages ranking?
• Are you using words on your site that people are actually using to search?
• What can you do to improve this and get more visitors to your site?

Pillar 3: Making sure your customers buy from you

Once you have visitors to your site, you need to ensure that they buy from you. Pillar 3 is all about website conversion and how easy your website is for visitors to find and do what they want to do. This is called website usability.

• Are buttons really clear?
• Is labeling immediately understandable?
• Do your visitors have the information they need to make a purchase/sign-up/download decision?

Without any one of these three pillars working for you, you will struggle to achieve the website success that you are looking for.

Consider for example, the beautifully designed website, with real WOW factor, that can’t be indexed by Google and that no-one can find. Or the site that ranks well with the search engines, attracts many visitors, but achieves very little sales. Neither of these sites will do as well as they could. All three pillars need to be reviewed holistically in order to achieve the website success you are looking for.

So take some time out to review your site. Have you got all three pillars covered? Do you have a beautiful site that clearly shows what you are all about? Are you attracting lots of visitors? And are people buying from you? If you answer yes to all three questions then congratulations! If you have any doubt, now’s the time to take a good look, and make some changes.

Good luck!

If you have found this article interesting and would like to read more, check out Wendy’s article on getting your small business website right.

Sesame Internet Marketing is an Internet Marketing Consultancy. Wendy specialises in helping businesses understand where the opportunities are for their websites as well as providing Search Engine Optimisation, site auditing and website project management services.  Full details of the services offered can be found here.

Follow Wendy on twitter: www.twitter.com/wendychamier

Follow Wendy on Google +: Wendy Chamier