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Hiding In The Abyss Or Abundant With Opportunities – Which Describes Your Website?

13th September 2022

Every Day ~15k Websites Are Made Live: Competition is Fierce

Competition has never been so fierce, and yet competition will never again be this low.

This is normally valid when considering the pace of technological change.

However whilst the type of places to be returned on Google is growing, currently 50+, the reality is that there are many more websites looking to take up that finite amount real estate.

The inexorable rise of usage of the internet over the last two-ish decades has brought with it a huge rise in the number of websites competing for that real estate. In fact, in the last 5 years alone, the world’s website count has more than doubled, going from an estimated 900 million in January of 2016 to an incredible 1.9 billion in 2022 (Statista).
How can you make your website stand out from the crowd with all this competition?
This exact question was posed to David by a member of the Fife Chamber. So, in order to help members of the Chamber, Inspire has put together this web surgery to give business owners a practical guide on how to make their website more attractive to users in the deep, dark sea of the internet.

Understanding Google is key

First we need to understand what Google is looking to return in their rankings. They spend billions understanding what users are looking for, why, how, where, when, etc.

Google will look to reward websites that demonstrate EAT:

Experience/Expertise
Authority
Trustworthiness

Everything flows from this.

On occasion we’ll disagree with their why, when and where, but rarely their how and what. And eventually, they come back to our way of thinking since we’re all human.

Functionality is the first step to online success

Without a well-functioning website, you stand no chance of online success. It’s essential that the overall experience for site users is smooth, pleasant and meets their expectations.

The technical functionality of a website covers a range of important elements, including:

Loading speed
Site security
Internal links
Page navigation
Form submissions
Embedded images

If your site’s load speed is slow, forms don’t work, links are broken, or images fail to load, it’s only natural for users to quickly leave your site. After all, there are bound to be at least ten more sites offering similar information or services to yours – that is the harsh reality of the online marketplace.

Therefore, if you want to keep users on your site, encourage return customers and rake in enquiries, attending to your site's technical functionality is imperative.

User-friendly design

Optimising the way your site looks and feels for your target audience is an important yet often overlooked step in creating a website.

Taking simple steps to ensure your content is clearly visible and easy to navigate will work wonders for conversion. Likewise, making sure your site’s layout is uncluttered, attractive to the eye and properly labelled will result in users staying on your site for longer.

A clear and attractive design will also encourage a wider audience to frequent your site. Although you may want your site to look high-tech and advanced, what good is that if it alienates a significant portion of your customer base?

In fact, in our experience, we find that the best-designed sites are the ones that can be used by any type of user, from computer experts to technophobes and everyone in-between.

Getting your site found with SEO

SEO, short for search engine optimisation, is one of the most important factors in getting your site found on the web. It is a crucial component that brings all the other website elements together to truly make you stand out from the competition.

SEO uses a combination of methods to get your website ranking on Google, Bing, and other platforms for the most relevant search terms. If you ignore SEO, you may find that all your hard work spent on improving the look of your site is wasted, as instead of appearing on page 1 of Google, your site is buried on page 10 next to the dead bodies.

You can find out more about the importance of SEO via the Inspire blog.

Providing value

The final component of making your website stand out from the competition is to provide value to your users. Gone are the days when you could throw in some keywords, offer a service and get thousands of customers visiting your site each month.

As the internet has expanded, users now have a wealth of high-quality information at their fingertips. This means that your site has to offer something other sites do not.

Simple ways to provide meaningful value to your customers are: