Your website is the first contact point prospects have with your brand and company. Thus, it makes sense to effectively communicate what you do through a user-friendly and professional website design. The truth is web design encompasses various variables, including graphics, layouts, content, conversion rate optimization, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Although while website design is a critical and significant part of web development and your website promotional efforts, most businesses tend to forget that it's simply one component of a comprehensive digital marketing plan. Therefore, it should be consistent in purpose, feel, and look with other marketing efforts you employ to boost your business, like pay-per-click advertising or social media marketing.
More so, you'll need to ensure website accessibility for visually-impaired users by adding popular screen readers and technological solutions, such as optical character recognition, keyboard navigation optimization, and automatic audio playing.
We'll be exploring the importance of web design and digital marketing for businesses in 2023. Read to the end to discover reasons to make your web design blend in with your overall digital marketing plan.
Reasons to Consider Web Design for Your Business
If you're interested in redesigning your website you might want to learn the importance of website design to motivate you.
At Ardor SEO, we believe that a website design is crucial but we also want to make sure that you have a compelling message to begin with. We prefer Storybrand framework that helps clarify your message and we always implement it on our client websites. We’ve seen websites convert just through messaging even when they didn’t have a well designed website.
So, it’s a fine line between having a great design and a compelling brand message and it depends on various factors as priorities and budget. It’s usually a decision that we as SEO managers take along with our clients.
Having said that, here are some of the reasons to consider web design for your business are:
1. Aids Your SEO Strategy
Web design practices and elements often influence the way you publish content on the site, affecting the way search engine spiders move and index your website. So you can't afford to mess this up.
If your on-page SEO fundamentals aren't up to par it'll limit your marketing efforts. Aside from the way you publish content on your website, some web design elements can also adversely affect SEO, leading to reduced web traffic. While web design is often difficult to understand, a web designer needs to make the code SEO-friendly and also mobile-friendly.
Not to forget, there are different SEO strategies for different kind of websites. For example, a real estate website would have fairly different strategies to an ecommerce website. So, a project manager should go hand-in-hand with a website designer so that all the SEO strategies are implemented on the website from the get go!
2. Sets the First Impression
The impression you have about a brand is often determined by how much you liked their website layout, user interface, and ease of use. Your audience will judge your business seconds into visiting your website. Therefore, you need to make an impact on them before they leave your site.
If your website appears outdated or unappealing it will invariably affect the way your audience views your business. Furthermore, it'll deter them from your page, which in turn will make you lose leads to your competitors.
Thus, web design is crucial because it affects how your audience sees your brand. Simply put, the impression your website makes on your web visitors will either get them to stay on your page and discover more about your business or exit your page and check your competitor's websites.
But that doesn’t always mean that a great looking website converts! Writing a compelling message like we said before, that aligns with your audience’s pain points & interests, and nudges them to a make a decision – is equally important if not more!
Let Ardor SEO help you design your website & craft a message that not only brings new audience to your website, but also converts! Reach out to us here.
3. Increases Your Audience's Trust
People don’t trust poorly designed websites. As we mentioned earlier, a poorly designed website will leave an awful first impression on visitors. However, besides leaving a poor first impression, it will also make your site appear shady, breeding mistrust.
If your website doesn't convey enough trust, customers will be reluctant to give you their money. A professional site indicates confidence so your clients will feel comfortable enough to check out your business further.
It's imperative to establish trust with your audience. That way, they remain on your site longer, creating more opportunities to get more leads.
4. Creates Consistency
As a new business or a brand going online for the first time, you'll need to create consistency to get your audience to buy from you when they decide to opt for your product or services. Online web designs are perfect for creating uniformity across your pages.
Your website pages must have the same layouts, styles, and fonts. Having different designs on each page makes your website appear unprofessional. It also affects your brand building because it makes it difficult to associate your brand with a particular color or colors.
It's best to ensure that you link your social media platforms to your website by adding active social media and search icons that your visitors can click on when they visit your site.
5. Emulate Your Competitors
The truth is, your competitors already have a professional web design. Thus, you need to upgrade if you intend to compete and make your website stand out from the crowd.
Suppose you have an outdated, low-quality, old website, that takes 5 or more seconds to load, chances are that your visitors will leave you for your competitors. Their well-designed site will outperform yours, meaning that you'll keep losing leads to your competitions whose pages and brand message are more appealing.
Importance of Digital Marketing to Present Day Businesses
The truth is, no online business can thrive without an effective web development and digital marketing plan.
Is digital marketing hard? Probably, yes if you are trying to do all of it yourself while running your business. But you can always outsource digital marketing efforts to established and proven agency like Ardor SEO so that you can focus on what you do best - running your business.
As a budding business, engaging in effective digital marketing efforts has so many benefits, including:
Target Your Ideal Demographic and Customer
One primary reason brands go for digital marketing to scale their businesses is due to targeting. In a nutshell, targeting entails presenting your online advertising campaign to your brand's ideal customers.
Therefore, instead of running a general advert like a billboard where even people outside your target audience will see it, targeting helps you narrow your customers down. It also ensures only people interested in what you do come across your advert.
Reach More Prospects
Digital marketing helps you reach your target customers where they prefer spending their time, unlike traditional marketing channels, such as direct mail, print ads, TV, or billboards.
According to the 2022 Digital Report from Hootsuite, an average individual spends twice the amount of time used to watch TV on the internet. In 2021 alone, the number of internet users worldwide increased from 298 million to 4.95 billion, meaning that about 62.5 percent of the global population are internet users.
Easy Social Media Reach
Popular social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram allow you to build your platform and gain huge followerships. Besides that, it enables you to run your ads to a segregated audience looking for your product or service.
In Facebook Ads Manager, there's an excellent targeting tool called the lookalike audience. Here, Facebook algorithms analyze people that have been engaging with your Instagram account over a specified period, such as an entire year, one month, two months, or three months.
The data from the analysis will formulate a common data point between the two platform engagers and gather it together to create a new audience, helping you find new cold customers.
Analytics, Tracking, and Data
Presently, data is the most valuable commodity. Understanding web design and digital marketing will provide you with a clear insight into the strategies that are working and those that aren't.
You can easily decide where to invest your effort, money, or time by analyzing your insights and data. More so, it helps you discover and test potential markets for your brand. However, for a successful marketing web development plan, you need to learn vital information about your audience, such as:
- The estimated number of people that saw your post or ad, including print ads, radio, and TV.
- The number of people that engaged with your post or ad.
This information helps provide insight into what's working and what isn't and if your audience likes your content or if you'll need to try another strategy.
Compete With Others
As businesses adapt to the changes resulting from the pandemic, digital marketing services have continued to be relevant. The truth is, to effectively compete against your competitors, you must consider creating a viable digital marketing plan.
If your business has been underperforming, consider growing it by adopting effective digital marketing strategies like content marketing. Other valuable digital marketing techniques include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), social media marketing, and search engine marketing (SEM).
Investing in paid advertising through cost-effective marketing platforms like social media is one of the best ways to reach your target audience, gain new customers, and grow your business.
How Web Design Boosts Digital Marketing Through SEO
Before approaching web design to help boost digital marketing through SEO, consider the objectives your website will achieve long-term. While new web design trends come and go, you'll need your brand image and online presence to remain the same.
Thus, don’t go for fleeting web design trends but focus on updating your accessibility level constantly, improving your user experience, and website functionality. It's best to prioritize optimizing your website for popular search engines people use to find your business, and these optimizations include off-page and on-page techniques.
On-page SEO often deals with aspects that you can optimize on your website for search engines, such as adding alt tags in images, meta descriptions, and catchy headlines. On the other hand, off-page SEO involves optimizing some aspects of your site to improve its ranking, like building social signals and quality backlinks through guest posts.
Seeing as search engines and users prefer a web design that's mobile-friendly and easy to use, optimizing your site is a necessity. Every business owner looking to scale their business should opt for a responsive web design, seeing as the future of online searches is mobile. Popular search engines like Bing and Google currently reward responsible sites with a higher ranking.
Besides trimming down the need to run two websites for both mobile and desktop, a responsive website leads to a low bounce rate.
Designing a User-friendly Website for Visually-impaired Persons
Since June 2001, all federal websites have complied with the directive to make their website accessible to people living with disabilities. In compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), brand owners have begun to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.
Visually impaired people use screen readers, so you'll need to consider screen reader optimization on your website to ensure blind users visiting your site get the best value for their time.
Final Words
And that's a wrap! Hopefully, you've discovered the importance of website design and digital marketing strategy for your business in 2023. If you've been leaving money on the table and allowing your competitors to take customers that should have been yours then you now know what to do to scale your business. Don't forget to add screen reader mode and so that visually impaired users can easily access your website.
Before dabbling in website design and digital marketing, understand that it takes a high level of expertise and professionalism for it to work and generate leads. Therefore, ensure you're working with a reputable online marketing design firm.
If you want to discover new ways to use website design and digital marketing to grow your brand, request a free call from Ardor SEO today. We'll analyze your current website to determine how best to proceed with a comprehensive strategic online marketing campaign.
