There are currently more than 1.5 billion websites on the World Wide Web today. When you look at that number, you may start wondering how you’re going to get people to visit your website. Thankfully, there are some essential and unavoidable steps everyone has to take in order to make their site successful.

Determine Your Goals

Once you come up with an idea for a website, it’s time to start thinking about your goals. It is important to do this before you actually start working on the actual site. Define exactly what you’re looking to achieve, since this will have a big impact on the design. It’s recommended you start with major goals and ultimately separate each one of them into smaller and specific tasks. For instance, if one of your major goals is to expand your customer base, then you should separate it into tasks like writing informative blogs, coming up with clever online marketing campaigns, and responding to comments on your posts.

Make It Look Professional

Making your website visually pleasing is crucial if you want to ensure your visitors to keep coming back. Avoid using too many colors or different types of fonts. Remember that simplicity is one of the best qualities a website can have. The type of design that would perfectly fit your website depends on the industry you’re in. For instance, if you’re making it for your law firm, then it should look serious and professional.

There’s a good chance most of your web traffic will come from mobile devices. This is why it’s essential to create a responsive website. When someone visits it on their smartphone, it should be optimized for it and load quickly. Keep in mind that last year Google mentioned how mobile page speed is a ranking factor. In other words, if you want your website to pop up as a search result on Google, you will need to ensure it is optimized for mobile devices.

Optimize Your Website for Search Engines

You most likely heard of search engine optimization (SEO) before. When it comes to building a successful website, optimizing it for search engines is one of the best things you can do. Know that doing this will take some time and effort on your part. Even though this can be quite challenging, understand that it’s an essential part of getting free organic traffic.

Getting good rankings on search engines is not easy. The content on your website will need to be SEO-friendly. This means that you should search for keyword phrases for each article. Make sure you place it both in the headline and in the body. In fact, the phrase should be mentioned at least a few times throughout the article. Note that there are many different SEO tools that make this whole job easier for you. While search engine optimization is definitely an unavoidable step to making a successful website, you shouldn’t forget that you’re writing for a specific audience and not a search engine.

In case you have a small business, you should pay special attention to local SEO. For example, if you have a hat store in Los Angeles, you should optimize your content so that your keyword phrase includes geographical data relevant to the city or area you’re business is in. Local SEO is also important for restaurants, medical practices, and law firms.

Encourage Visitors to Take Action

Your call to action (CTA) is arguably the most important element of your website. If you want to have a successful site, you will need to show your visitors what you want them to do. It doesn’t matter if it’s subscribing to a newsletter, scheduling a consultation, requesting additional information, or buying a product, your call to action should make sense to your customers.