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6 Ways Your Website Can Differentiate from the Competition

April 29, 2019
By Team Hello
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If you want to maximize your company’s chances of boosting sales and conversions, your website needs to stand out from the crowd. In today’s digital world, more and more businesses are building an online presence and taking advantage of new ways to market and share ideas online. To save on costs, many companies are investing in cheap themes and free content management systems (CMS).

While this tactic may keep you from spending tons of money on a website, it can do more harm than good. Your website can have the best search engine optimization (SEO) techniques in the world and rank number one for every search query relevant to your business. But if your website is generic and unremarkable, people will just click away. This actually hurts your SEO because Google doesn’t like high bounce rates. To keep your brand relevant in today’s the digital world, your website should be unique and offer a great user experience (UX).

Below are 6 ways your website can differentiate to stand out from your competitors:

1. Live Chat

People like fast answers and solutions. Live chat offers this perk. With live chat, customers can avoid waiting on hold during phone calls or waiting for a 24-48 response to an email. Live chat gives solutions almost instantaneously. By adding live chat capabilities to your website, you can enhance the customer experience and boost conversions. According to a report by ICMI, for customers who chat before making a purchase, there is a 10% increase in order value. The report also found that website visitors that engage with companies via live chat are worth 4.5 times more than visitors that don’t. Companies who utilize live chat on their websites also saw a 40% increase in their conversion rate.

2. UX

Consumer expectations are high when it comes to company websites. If your website loads slowly, isn’t responsive to multiple devices, and isn’t easy to navigate, visitors will become impatient and hit the back button. Then, they’ll find a competitor’s website in the search results, putting yours to the back of their mind. Remember, consumers are looking for fast answers that are easy to find. If your website doesn’t live up to this demand, you’ll fall behind your competition.

3. Fresh Content

Your website’s blog should showcase content that is constantly changing with the times. Keeping outdated content on your website will make your business appear less credible and trustworthy. Visitors will leave your page and look for fresher content elsewhere. Not regularly updating your website can also hurt your SEO, which will help your competitors outrank you in the search engines.

4. Video

A quick intro video can bring personality to your brand and make it relatable to your potential customers. Video can foster the human connection other brands are failing to achieve. You can add video to your “About” page to break up the monotony of text and build trust with customers. This shows your visitors that you have a relatable personality by showing your smile in action or telling a compelling story about yourself.

5. Unique Design

To stand out from your competitors, you want your website to look different from what visitors are used to seeing. Content is important, but people are visual first. A unique website design not only captures attention, but it also shows creativity, which can build trust and boost conversions.

6. Mobile-Friendliness

With mobile searches making up 52.2 percent of all website traffic, your company website should be mobile-responsive, meaning it displays well on mobile devices. Recent research by Google showed that a staggering 96% of consumers have been to sites that weren’t mobile-ready. You can use this to your advantage and make your website mobile-responsive to offer a better mobile experience than your competitors.