As we discuss here, your brand is the sum total of all of your activities. As such, the website needs to work in conjunction with the rest of your company – the same values, the same imaging, the same tone of voice – you get the picture.

We’ve all heard the old adage about how you only get one chance to make a first impression. That is now multiplied exponentially online. Statistics show that some visitors to your website start to form an opinion after 50 milliseconds. The average blink takes about 400 milliseconds. So, people are judging you, literally, quicker than the blink of an eye. Your homepage needs to clean and clear and deliver a concise message.

And here we have the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. The truth is that people remember pictures with more accuracy than they remember text. This isn’t to say that your website should have no text (because we know that isn’t true). It is to say that your site should have thoughtful design that leads your buyer through the journey and funnels them towards to call to action. The navigation should be clear and intuitive. The site should be built to provide a good user experience (UI/UX).

A Call to Action, or CTA, is the action you are trying to get your potential customer to take, so that you can continue to move them through the Buyer Journey. Most frequently CTAs are phone calls, click to calls (on mobile) and form fills. You’re trying to get the potential customer to reach out to you for more information and to begin the human interaction. If you have a more complex product or service and a longer funnel, then you may have CTAs that include downloads of whitepapers, infographics or other information sources.

When someone gets to your site, you really want the whole site to load up so they can see it in under 2 seconds, per Google. 40% of internet users report abandoning a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That’s almost half of your potential clients disappearing before you have an opportunity to impress them. Load speed is impacted by images, javascript, cache, and lots more.

It seems like this should go without saying these days, as all sites should be mobile responsive. This means your site should render on a mobile phone very similar to the desktop version of your website. If not, you are definitely losing business. Approximately 60% of all searches now happen on mobile. And Google has a mobile-first policy, meaning that they decide where to serve up your site on a search results page based on the load speed of your mobile site, not your desktop version.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is basically earning your position on a search results page with strong showings in over 200 metrics like, page structure, meta tags and descriptions, and keywords. You will continue to improve your SEO as you go with more optimization, more content, more backlinks, etc. But when the site comes to you as new, it should include all of the basic technical SEO already in place.