Using Your Website to Drive Growth as a Startup

For any new startup, a website is an indispensable tool. Your website will be the first point of contact between you and your audience and will provide many users with their very first experience of your business. If you use your website to its full effectiveness, then it can be a powerful driver of growth for your business. Here’s how you can make that happen.

Create Shareable Content

Even in the internet age, word-of-mouth remains one of the most effective tools for getting the word out about a business. However, it is no longer restricted to in-person conversations. Viral content can now spread from one person to another via social media or other websites.

When your business is still in its earliest stages, your website will inevitably form a core component of your growth strategy. Creating shareable content that visitors are likely to want to share with their friends will help you to get the word out about your business quickly and efficiently. All it takes is one piece of viral content, and suddenly, your business could be in front of millions of people.

However, it is important not to fall into the trap of trying so hard to create viral content that you end up creating content that isn’t engaging at all. Just because a particular article has gone viral for someone else, that doesn’t mean that you can just pump out something similar and expect the same results. Focus on creating high-quality content that provides your users with genuine value and they will do the rest of the work for you.

Put SEO at the Heart of Your Strategy

It doesn’t matter how much effort you put into building and populating your website if no one can find it. If you don’t have a coherent search engine optimisation strategy and you aren’t constantly on top of your SEO, then it is all too easy for your website to disappear from search results pages. Once you have lost your coveted ranking, it can be a long and expensive process to get it back again.

If you don’t have any experience of running an SEO campaign yourself and you have never had to devise a comprehensive SEO strategy, then it is usually better to consult with a professional business that can handle this side of things for you. Whether you work with a business like bigsurfdigital.co.uk, based in Glasgow, or you work with individual SEO specialists, having expert professional guidance can make an enormous difference. Big Surf Digital can help you to drive more traffic to your website and also improve your ranking in Google results pages.

Being able to track truly reflective growth metrics for a startup company is important when budgeting, so always keep on top of how you track success.

Optimise Your Content for Mobile

This might seem like an obvious step to take in 2020, but you would be surprised at how many businesses are still failing to take mobile users into account. There was a time, a while ago now, when businesses would have to maintain two entirely separate versions of their website, one for mobile users and a main one for everyone else. However, it is now relatively simple to design a website that will adjust itself automatically so that it is always displayed optimally for the user, irrespective of the device they are browsing it on.

Optimising your content for mobile doesn’t just mean ensuring that it displays correctly, however; you should also cut back on unnecessary features for your mobile version and avoid serving up data-heavy elements on your website without the user first requesting them. This will significantly reduce the data costs for mobile users who are accessing your website while on the go.

If you haven’t yet built your website, then you might even want to consider making mobile users your priority. Most internet browsing is now done from mobile devices such as smartphones and laptops, so it actually makes a lot of sense to target these devices over desktops, laptops, and more traditional internet-connected systems. The best target for you to focus your efforts on will depend on your target audience. If you are expecting most of your users to access your website through mobile devices then it makes sense to ensure that the experience has been optimised for them.

When they are used in the right way, business websites can be very effective tools for driving growth and improving the reputation of a business. Remember that every person you can get to visit your website represents another opportunity for you to convert a stranger into a loyal customer. In order to achieve this, you want newcomers to land on a website that is easy to navigate, professionally-designed, and filled with worthwhile content. If you can provide value through the additional content on your website, you can build an audience beyond the users who come to you to spend money directly.