When you get developed your website, you must ask a question “Just having a website is enough?” Certainly not, website is just a ‘skeleton’ until your website has its soul in terms of proper strategy, navigation, responsiveness flow and content targeted to the prospective customers.

If you are wondering that your website in not yielding results in terms of leads and visitors in spite of great design, you need to get a reality check and get your website audited by web experts. I am trying to list of 10 points which needed to be taken care of while you want to get develop an effective and engaging website:

1. Is Design and cultural relevance considered? : While you conceptualize design for your website, you need to keep in mind your target visitors’ social, cultural and regional preferences. A color could be favorite in one region and other may not even like it. Give reasonable time to brainstorm about the color scheme, graphics as they are the key to keep your website visitors engaged and reducing the bounce rate.

2. Is it Easy to Navigate? : You need to check your website if it is easy to navigate. If the navigation is confusing or it is too complex, your website is bound to have higher bounce rate and lesser leads. New visitors do not have patience to waste time in searching information of their interest while they have plenty of other options on google.

3. Is it easy to view your website? : You need to test your website if it is easy to view across the browsers and mobile devices of different screen sizes. You can use Bootstrap 3, HTML5, CSS3 etc to make your website responsive. A mobile responsive website is easy to navigate and reduces the bounce rate considerably.

4. Is your website too slow? : If a website is taking more than 3 seconds to open up, it means your website has got some serious optimization problem in loading which could be due to the issues of CSS, JQuery slider, non-optimized images, hanging scripts etc. Search engines do not consider it good. You need to get your website analyze and resolve the optimization issues.

5. Is your website has SEO Optimized Content : Content is king and if it is not properly used, king will be angry which upsets search engines booting robots. Content must not be making hard sales pitch, should not be monotonous and must have 1%-2% of targeted keywords density. Target keywords must not be unnecessarily stuffed; use must be contextual and smooth.

6. Is your website has dead links and canonical issues? : You need to get your website tested to check if it still has any dead link or canonical issues which not only hurts your SEO ranking but also ruins the good perception of visitors towards the website.

7. Haven’t you bother to update the content for long now? : Nobody likes to eat stale food or to visit same monument time and again. Content must be updated on regular interval to keep the website engaging, lively and refreshed. You must share the latest information about your products and services in order to generate curiosity among your visitors. Are you doing this?

8. Are you sure about using social media effectively on your website? : Social media Marketing has become an integral part of every business’s promotional strategy and ability to keep your customer engaged can bring great difference. Here you directly talk to your customers. Analyze your website to check how effectively and at which place you have used social media feeds and icons. Encourage sharing options. Use email capture boxes and RSS feeds effectively. Keep an admin “on go” to manage all social media accounts as it is double edge sword which can be used for making and breaking your online reputation.

9. Is your contact form and details easily visible? : Contact us forms and details must be kept very handy on your website to get leads. Contact us forms must not be very lengthy with too many compulsory fields. Forms with too many compulsory fields are less likely to get leads. Use captcha to keep robots away. Do not want too many calls, use email id and respond within 24 hours.

10. What do Analytics and Visitor patterns say? : To know the users visit pattern and issues with the website you can use tools like Google Analytics or webmaster tool etc, which help you to analyze and take corrective action wherever your website is losing the battle of competition to your competitors. Re-draw your overall online marketing strategy if needed to be based on the above results.
So, only having a website won’t yield you the results and ROI, just like sowing a seed is just beginning of long process to nurture it into a fruit bearing tree. If you feel your website is not giving your results as expected, get an expert to analyze it.