Thanks to the ever changing digital marketing trends, having a business website has become a vital part of every business’s strategy. Whether it is to reach out to the potential clients or to showcase their products and services to the world, businesses seem to be catching up with the trends. But considering that all businesses - big and small - have a website of their own, how do you ensure your website’s success?

Here are some steps on how to create a successful website:

Step 1: Develop a Business Website Strategy.

With platforms like WordPress available, anyone can create a website and get on to promoting it on various platforms. But how does your website feature into your business strategy? Or is it totally irrelevant?

Business websites play a vital part in building your image on the Internet and you don’t want to mess that up. If your website is not in sync with your business strategy, it could actually end up harming you. So, develop a strategy for your website that goes hand in hand with the business strategy offline to ensure that the right business message reaches out to your target audience.

Step 2: Create a Neat Website

You don’t want all the great content you work on to go waste just because your website is not alluring enough. A successful website relies on more than just good color themes and fonts; the first impression is the last impression and it matters.

Make sure your website doesn’t bombard your visitor with ads as that will mingle with their interest in your content. Create a neat landing page and let the visitor navigate according to what he wishes to see.

Another factor that plays in while creating an alluring website, is to keep the load time under three seconds to avoid bounce offs. To ensure that, keep all your content - text, images, media etc optimized for all browsers and search engines at all times.

Step 3: Decide What’s Free and What’s Not

If you are looking forward to gaining some revenue from your website, decide which content you’d like to offer for free and which you’d like to feature in the paid version. Make sure you don’t seem to be nudging the user to opt for a paid package as many would see the tag ‘paid’ and navigate to another website offering similar content.

Divide your website’s content fairly into paid and free sections. Offer equally relevant, unique and competitive content in both the sections.

Step 4: Submit Your Website to Directories

Submit your website and all its important links to online directories to ensure that each web page is crawled, indexed and ranked. This way you are searched for your niche in a much better way. These directories are like the address book of the digital marketing world.

Step 5: Get Your SEO Right

Search Engine Optimization is of prime importance for a successful business website. You need your website to be optimized in terms of focus keywords depending on your niche. This ensures that you become the first choice of a browser when looking for an expert in your field.

Generate backlinks from high PR sites that offer content in sync with yours. It helps drive in more traffic and build an online presence.

Step 6: Get Your Website Hosted

Once all your website content is ready, you don’t want it to lose out on attention just because your site broke down because of a small technical error. To ensure your website is served up to the world wide web via the Internet in the most efficient manner possible, look for an affordable web hosting provider who offers all the resources your website and all its functionalities need to run efficiently to deliver uniform customer experience.

Step 7: Get Social

Make sure your website is promoted as much as it deserves. You don’t want all your content going waste, so use the trending social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to reach out to maximum audience. Create a social media presence to ensure regular drive in of traffic on your business website.

Step 8: Engage Your Audience

To keep your audience hooked onto your website, ensure that your posts encourage them to interact. Embed a lot of ‘call-to-action’ buttons to subtly nudge them to take action.

Don’t always focus on sales in your posts; conduct contests or giveaways every now and then to keep your readers coming back for more.

Step 9: Monitor Your Website

Don’t keep running a strategy just for the heck of it. Monitor your website’s progress in terms of traffic and conversions to observe how successful your strategy is. Make sure your website’s strategy goes hand in hand with your business’s strategy so that you don’t lose track of your ultimate goal.

Bring about a little tweaks in your strategy every now and then, and observe the difference it brings in. You never know what might work best for your website.