Your website is the channel via which most people interact with your company. Your marketing activities, whether online or offline, are most likely to send users to your website. Whether it’s for getting information about your services and goods, making reservations or orders, or obtaining contact details. The functionality and aesthetics of your website, whether in line with your brand image or not, have a significant impact on how users view your company and services.
You may be running a fantastic marketing campaign only to be discouraged by sales because the landing page on your website is not converting. For a number of reasons, a website may be underperforming, including site speed, responsiveness, or navigation. For your digital marketing strategy’s success, you should not underestimate the importance of a quality website.
Analyze your website, considering the following factors:
- Conversion rate – are you converting prospects into customers/leads?
- Competition – do you surpass competition or vice versa?
- Branding – Is your brand reflected by your website?
- SEO – how well are you performing on search engines?
- Responsiveness – is your website responsive?
- Site speed – are the pages loaded quickly?
If you don’t get the results you’d like, and your site doesn’t meet expectations for most of these factors, then a revamp might be worth considering.
Need a new website?
If you think you need a new website, then when you undergo a redesign, make sure you consider the following factors. You should talk to your web designer about each one to ensure that any changes you make to your website will have a favorable impact. Very often, a redesign causes a site to perform worse than its predecessor because each of these factors hasn’t been considered for the design.
A website rich with images, videos, and engaging content may look fantastic, but it will reduce site speed. This may increase the bounce rate, as people don’t want to wait for pages to load.
Audience
Who is the website for?
First, identify what your target group is, and create the site they’d like. Is it for:
- Potential Clients / Leads
- Existing Customers/subscribers
- News / Press
- Staff / Internal Interested Parties
- Public at large
- Other
You can build personas for each section once you know who your audience is and create a user journey around them. This will help you understand what touch-points they come across, how they get to your site, and how they’d navigate it to reach the intended objective.
What is it that the target audience wants?
Before making any changes to your website, take the time to understand your audience and their online habits. Testing some designs on your current site is often a good idea before you modify the whole thing. This can be done by having a web developer design the landing pages for your campaigns. You can then run some A / B tests with your email or ad campaigns to see what was more successful. You can customize the page further by making minor adjustments to the Call to Action (CTA) to understand what works for your target demographic. You can include the data in the plans to create an optimized website once you have collected it.
Your website should be in sync with your branding and include all the key messages your audience would expect from any other marketing channel as it interacts with your brand.
Defining the goals of the website
What is Your Website’s purpose?
Your marketing strategy should define your goals. These may include lead generation, sales, or brand awareness. Those goals should be central to any redesign of websites. When selecting a web designer or agency, you should ask them to specify how their design meets those goals.
It is also essential that measurable KPIs are set for each goal. You may base them on conversions, visits, bounce rate, average page time, or rankings for keywords.
To ensure that your website meets your objectives, your web design has to take into account:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)
- User Experience (UX)
- Brand Identity
When working with best seo company in wollongong, can go a long way in aligning your marketing strategy with your objectives.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimization (SEO) is about increasing the organic visibility of your website on search engines, which can be achieved through various on-page and off-page activities. It is essential that your site is viewed on search because approximately 93 percent of online activity starts on a search engine.
And with about 60 percent of mobile searches, a responsive website is a no-brainer. Nowadays, most websites are built with responsiveness in mind, but there are many devices they need to be compatible with, so getting that right can be tricky.
Many sites aren’t responsive, so when you have to use one on a smartphone, it can be frustrating.
In addition to responsiveness, a web designer should consider other on-page optimization activities, such as improving the site’s content, navigation, and technical areas.
Any changes you make to the site may affect your SEO performance for the better or worse, affecting your rankings in search engines such as Bing and Google. A good design must consider the following factors:
Navigation and Structure:
You want the users to navigate your site as efficiently as possible. It’ll even help bots, as they crawl your website, to make a map of it.
Aesthetics:
While not as critical as user-friendliness, your design should look fantastic, so users stay on your site and want to revisit it.
Metadata:
You want your website to let you input custom metadata and alt tags, which will provide more explanation of pages and content. This gives bots more page information when they are crawling the site. Also, the page title and the meta description are the first things a user sees in the SERPs and will then decide whether they click on your link.
Content:
A website should have the functionality to create new content so that more pages are indexed in Google. This would increase the likelihood that your website will be listed on search engines, which will ensure that information about your website is accessible on the internet. A website that is continuously changing gets more frequently crawled by Google.
If your current website is not optimized for navigation, speed, and design, you can have a web designer build your website, taking these factors into account.
They should also be considered as a part of the UX design.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your site to improve a user’s chances of performing the desired action and increasing your conversion rate (CR).
A conversion doesn’t always have to be the purchase of a product. It will depend entirely on your goals. It may include:
- Contact Form Submissions
- Email Submissions / Newsletter subscription
- Booking Completion
- Creation of an account
- Completion of transaction
You need to design your site to drive users to such a call to action. A talented team of web designers can make all the difference because they know how to balance appearance and efficiency. If you brief them on your priorities, they’ll consider it in the planning stages, which means you’ll be in the best place to refine your site for CRO.
While CRO’s management and analysis are your marketing team’s responsibility, they will need designers’ support to maximize A/B and multivariate testing.
User Experience (UX)
User Experience is geared towards customer satisfaction. While designing a website, you want to make it user friendly, accessible, and worthwhile. UX is vital for web design and is closely related to SEO and CRO. Search engines are attempting to match user needs with the most relevant sites, which would also consider sites with the best UX and usability. And when you optimize your website to be converted, you’ll need a website that thinks about user journey throughout the site from start to finish.
A visually appealing website is significant because users will have a higher emotional response from seeing something they find pleasing. Several websites, however, prioritize looks over usability. This is risky because users may like a site ‘s look, but if they find it hard to use and pages take a long time to load, then they are unlikely to have a positive experience and come back.
Web users have high expectations about how quickly a website should load. Make sure images or videos are compressed so that file size is limited and server compression is activated. It is easier to be mindful of the site speed and the file size during the design phases, rather than backtracking when the site is live. Nevertheless, Google’s PageSpeed Tool can give you more information on how to boost your site’s speed. Navigation is essential to user experience as well. When the user can’t find what they’re searching for, then they’re going to leave and go to your competitor. This also applies to responsiveness. When using mobile, contact forms, and payment forms often don’t work very well. This can have a massive impact on final conversions.
It might seem like an impossible job to get that right, but a quality designer will be able to mix good aesthetics with performance. Once the website is complete, you should test it regularly to improve user experience.
Brand Identity
A website speaks volumes about your organization. Most customers will get an initial impression of the brand by visiting your website, so make sure you’re pleased with how it is represented.
Brand identity is essential to UX and CRO because it creates trust between the customer and your company and will affect their decision making. Poor experience on your website will reflect on your brand and may have a detrimental impact on performance.
If your brand is proud to be simple, fast, and easy, then the website experience should reflect this through navigation, structure, and visual. Brief your designer on your rules, principles, and messages for your brand and make sure they are translated onto your website.
Analytics and monitoring
As for all tactics, you need to have time for review. There is no such thing as a flawless site. It will have to adapt, change, and be continuously optimized to perform the way you want it to.
Most organizations want a website that turns users into beneficial actions. In which case, you’ll need to know which areas of your website perform well and which don’t.
You can monitor every area of your site to optimize it for users. You should devote some time to understanding the user’s journey and identifying pages that do not get traffic or convert. At a simple level, to do this, you can use Google Analytics, and everyone can learn how to use it.
Use Google Analytics Academy to take a free crash course on Google’s Analytics, and make sure you take advantage of this handy tool.
A robust website on the internet is far more than just a placeholder. It takes much further consideration to ensure that it fulfills its intended function. To support your Digital Marketing activities, you have to get it right. As a result of a poor website, the various marketing channels you use, such as social media, email, SEO, or PPC, may be less effective.
If you’re wondering why your site is not running as well as you had anticipated, then do an audit to see what is missing. If you conclude that you need a new website, make sure you consider all those design factors.Hiring professional help for your marketing campaign and for designing a website can go a long way and prove to be a good investment. If you are a local or regional business or just starting out, look out for professionals in the field in your area to help you crack into and capture the market effectively and efficiently. Look up for a “web design services in Wollongong” or “web design company wollongong” and choose the service that best suits your needs and your company’s objectives.
