Did you know that 80% of people search online for local businesses? Whatever your business is, what you seek is sales, sales and more sales. What is a great way to get those at a very low cost?

If you do not have a website for your business, you’re missing out on a most powerful marketing tool. Since most people considering a purchase will research the item online before making the purchase, it is important for business owners to have a website. Potential customers may not buy the product online, but they are certainly likely to research it online. So if you have a website, customers are more likely to find you and learn about your business.

Make Your Website Attract Lots of Sales

As a business owner, you don’t want a website that is poorly received by its users. What you want is for your website to both increase customer engagement and attract loads of sales. How can you do that?

Try these seven tips to create a website that will bring in those sales:

1. User-Friendly: Above all, your website must be user-friendly. A sure way to drive a potential customer away is to have a load time of more than two seconds. Waiting three seconds or more for your page to load will definitely drive 40% of people away. Other mishaps to avoid having are difficult navigation, broken links that lead to nowhere and flash-based pages.

If your website is to be user-friendly, its navigation should be simple. Keeping the navigation simple means that your site should have no more than five to ten navigation items in order to avoid overwhelming your users.

Tools to help users navigate your site such as directional arrows are also essential to making your site user-friendly. Ease in navigation makes it more likely users will stay and interact with your site.

Remember, simple navigation provides users with: knowledge of where they are on your site at all times, directions and a method to go back or home.

2. Mobile-Friendly: Make your website mobile-friendly and avoid Mobilegeddon. Since as many as 46% of people currently use their mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to research products, it is more important now than ever before to be mobile-friendly. Besides, Google developed a new algorithm for ranking websites in April resulting in sites that are not mobile-friendly to fall in their rankings and created what is known as Mobilegeddon. Sites that became way lower in their rankings most likely have suffered a huge loss of business.

Most consumers are currently using mobile devices to find the kinds of products and services offered by your business. For that reason, you must ask yourself, “Can consumers access my products’ and services’ information easily with the use of their smartphones or tablets?” Is your business website mobile-friendly?

You can turn your business website into a mobile-friendly site by simply creating an optimized for mobile devices version. The trick is to create a site in which its content and features load correctly on mobile devices. There are inexpensive tools available that can turn your site into a mobile-friendly one such as MobiSiteGalore, Mobify, Wirenode and Mobify.

3. Link to Social Media: Company websites provide information about their leadership, services or products offered and how to contact the company as well. Although this information is vital, it is not very exciting or at all engaging.

The story told by social networks is quite different. Facebook gives a business a personality that acquaints visitors with the people who make up the company. Twitter can be the news ticker of your business by keeping followers of your business up to the minute. You can make professional connections at LinkedIn, and the videos and photos of Pinterest give life to your company’s story.

What does all this accomplish? It builds familiarity, reaps trust and heightens likeability. In other words, people will want to do business with you because they know, like and trust you. The addition of social media links is a way to make all this happen.

4. Use Videos to Engage: Visitors to your website, won’t wait. In just one micro-second they decide whether to leave your site or stay. A great way to keep them at your site is with the addition of an online video. An online video will significantly increase the time they spend on your site, drive more views to your page and decrease the bounce rates. All three of these are key to getting better search engine outcomes.

Research has shown that 85% of people will watch a product video for at least one minute.

5. Get Conversions Through Optimization: Even though you lead people to your website, you may not get them to actually make a purchase. However, it is easier than you might think to make changes to your site that will certainly boost conversions. For one, you should make contacting you easy. This is very simply done by prominently displaying your contact information on your homepage including your phone number, live chat and a web form. It has been found that as many as 66% of small business websites foolishly do not include a fill-in form for allowing the option to request information, and, however, these forms are definitely something you should include.

An added bonus of displaying your contact information is an increase in your credibility. This is because it assures customers that if they need to talk to you, you are just a phone call away.

6. Maintain Up-to-Date Content: The content of your website must always be accurate. Therefore, you should always be sure to remove the content referring to products and services that are no longer offered by your business.

7. Avoid Old-Fashioned, Out-Dated Elements: The use of outdated elements gives your visitors the impression that your business is old. Use a simple modern design and portray an image suited for today’s market. Outdated elements to avoid include gaudy colors, text that swirls or blinks or use of all caps in type.