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Expert Answers to Biz Questions
Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.
Why Good Web Design is an Important Component of Marketing
Marketing is one of the largest expenditures for many businesses and it is vital for businesses of any size. It doesn’t matter how big your business is or how big your target market is, if you don’t market effectively then you will be trampled over by your competitors. There are plenty of things that modern businesses can do to augment their marketing, enabling smaller businesses to punch above their weight and larger businesses to maintain their market position.
Web design is often thought of as being entirely separate to a business’s marketing efforts. However, the two are closely linked with one another. To the point where if you think about your web design as part of your marketing efforts then you can augment the impact of both. Here are some of the key ways that your website can play a central role in your business’s marketing strategy.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a vital aspect of marketing. Without SEO, your website is doomed to be buried and hidden in obscurity. If you want people to be able to find your website, you need to pay attention to your SEO. Similarly, if you want people searching for particular terms to be bought to your website, you will need to foster your SEO score for the right terms.
SEO is something that any website can work on if they choose to, but if you bake it into your website’s design from the very beginning, you will find it much easier. Many aspects of SEO, such as regularly publishing high-quality content, will always have some overlap with your marketing. But there are lots of more subtle aspects to SEO, things that are beyond your control. If you can convince other reputable websites to link back to your content regularly, your SEO score will benefit.
Another important aspect of SEO - and one that is regularly forgotten - about is tagging. Tags make your website infinitely more organised and make it much easier for browsers and bots to analyse your website and its content. Ensuring that you are properly tagging everything from the get-go makes it much easier to build a highly organised and visible website.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversions are one of the key metrics for determining the success of your website; bringing more people to your website won’t do you much good if you aren’t also converting those visitors into customers. Needless to say, there is an endless list of factors that determine whether a visitor will be successfully converted into a paying customer, but some of them are going to be beyond your control.
However, there are plenty of things that you can do, particularly in terms of your website’s basic design, that will improve your conversion rates. It all begins with how you present your business to visitors to your website. It doesn’t matter what the quality of your offline offerings is like - if your business doesn’t stand up on its own then visitors are going to be less likely to give you their money.
In order to maximise conversions, you need a website design that facilitates the buying process for the user. That means a website that makes all of your products and services clear, as well as their pricing. It also means a website that is easy to navigate, even for someone who has never visited it before. We will talk more about the user experience shortly, but you will need to strike a balance between a website that is visually interesting and engaging, and one that is simple and straightforward to use.
User Experience
It goes without saying that the experience the user has when using your website will have a significant impact on the way that they perceive it. A website that is visually stunning is no good if it's impossible to navigate and awkward to use. On the other hand, a website that is easy to navigate and makes buying a breeze is going to have an easier time convincing visitors to hand over their money.
When your customers are shopping online, they have a multitude of other options that they can go to if they decide that your business or website is not up to standard. When you're on the internet, going to a new provider is a simple as typing a few keywords into your URL bar. Therefore, if you're website has delays or inefficiencies that hold up the user, there is a good chance that they will simply move along to one of your competitors.
If you design your entire website with the user experience as one of your main priorities, your users will be able to tell the difference. If you don’t have experience in constructing a user experience, it is worth considering hiring a professional to help you. For instance, there’s the Perth based company PWD who have ample experience in constructing user experience. They have a web design portfolio on their website which will allow you to see just how much they can transform a website. If you need help, reach out.
Branding
The key to using branding to its fullest potential lies in consistency. If you are able to maintain a clear and consistent through-line throughout all of your marketing, it will have a compounding effect on the efficacy of your marketing efforts, regardless of the medium you are using. However, if you are planning on putting your brand and business name on a website, you want to make sure that it is a website that you would be proud to lend your brand name to.
All it takes is one bad user experience and they will turn their back on your website for good. If you want to retain customers, increase conversions, and draw new visitors to your website in as large numbers as possible, then your website design will have a significant role to play. There is no one magic technique that will instantly transform your website’s fortunes. Instead, you need to take a more holistic approach. By considering your web design hand-in-hand with your marketing, you can redesign and renovate your website with purpose.
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