With your website being the first point of contact your prospects have of your business, it’s crucial that you put your best foot forward. By that, we mean providing it with an eye-catching and intuitive design.
If you’ve been struggling to see positive results from your website, a poor design might be the reason why.
People don’t like staying on a page that appears to be all over the place, nor one that is too confusing to navigate. They’d find themselves hopping to another website, which is most likely that of your competition’s – and that’s certainly the last thing you want to happen.
Indeed, web design plays an essential role in your digital marketing plan. It’s pretty much what keeps your potential and existing customers engaged and eager to learn more about your brand. However, that’s just one of the many reasons why you’ll want to incorporate it into your strategy.
In this post, you’ll discover how web design can greatly impact your marketing goals, and how it can eventually help your business prosper in this digital age. We’ll be giving you five incredible benefits of having a well-designed website that might just get you to start redesigning your website as soon as you’re done reading.
Also, you might want to stick around if you’re eager to learn several tactics to come up with a web design that can bring you all these benefits we’ll be tackling.
With these things in mind, let’s begin!
1. Improves SEO
While a good web design is a major factor in the success of a website, SEO (search engine optimization) remains to be the very foundation of any successful site.
There are digital marketers who have yet to realize that SEO and web design can actually go hand in hand. They believe that web design elements have nothing to do with search engine rankings.
Here’s the truth: Web design DOES affect search engine optimization.
Good design boosts your ranking, while bad design hurts it. Search engines, especially Google, love websites that offer a positive user experience (UX). They send their bots from site to site to judge their web design.
Keep in mind that bots are trying to mimic the human user experience.
What’s unappealing for human users is also unappealing for search engine bots. If your website has outdated content, hard-to-read text, or slow load times, you’ll create more barriers for your audience to engage. They’ll end up leaving instead. Bots will feel the same way, too, and in cases like this, they will drop your ranking.
2. Establishes you as an authoritative & reputable brand
Good web design means higher authority, and higher authority means your visitors will be more trusting of you. It gives a one-two punch that enables people to get over their intrinsic mistrust of brands and form a bond with your company more easily.
When your visitors are impressed with the way your website looks and operates, they’ll see you as a brand they can count on. They’ll become more invested to dig into your content and learn more about you and what you have to offer.
On the other hand, if users get any negative feelings about your website, they’ll be suspicious about your brand, killing your hopes of turning them into actual customers. A sloppily crafted website is usually a red flag for just about anyone who stumbles upon it.
Remember, every time people land on your website, they’ll immediately develop a perception of your brand and image. Your web design should be able to reflect who you are as a company. Otherwise, you’ll create a bad impression, making it more difficult for your visitors to build trust.
3. Brings more conversions
A responsive web design leads to higher conversions. Sites that provide a seamless, intuitive navigation structure gets visitors to keep browsing, which eventually results in higher conversion rates in terms of subscriptions and sales.
In contrast, those that offer a frustrating navigation experience discourages users from continuing exploring the pages. People lose interest in the company, and the company loses its opportunity to convert those people into customers.
The trick is to minimize what’s on your top navigation menu. For instance, if you have six different dropdowns with eight different options each in the top header, your visitors will struggle to figure out which to click.
Narrow your navigation down to a few options and ensure that at least one of the options provided directs users to a “click to call” link or contact page.
4. Leaves a lasting impression
First impressions can make or break a business. And, since your website helps in making the first impression on your customers, it’s definitely something you shouldn’t take lightly. You gotta put your best foot forward to win your target audience.
Believe it or not, it only takes 0.05 seconds for people to decide whether to stay or leave a website? Considering that the attention span of humans has gotten shorter because of this digital age we’re living in, it may not sound surprising anymore.
If you fail to wow your visitors with your web design, chances are, they’ll perceive you as a brand that doesn’t really value its customers. Especially if they’re not pleased with the user experience, they’ll have that firm assumption.
They’ll leave and bounce to another website instead, which is most likely that of your competition.
4. Helps you stand out from the rest
Although leaving a good impression is an excellent way to start off, it’s still extremely important to work on enhancing your web design to stay ahead of the curve.
Who knows, your competitors might be a step or two higher than where you are now.
You should have this mindset that everyone in your industry might also be busy building websites that can immediately catch the attention of their visitors. That’s why you should update yours every now and then.
If you want to truly stand out (we mean, who doesn’t?), your site must adopt the latest features in web design. It should have a mobile-friendly layout, offer dynamic UX, and get people hooked with a unique theme.
What’s more, strong branding and consistent use of colors, fonts, and creative layout can easily set you apart from everybody else – and we mean that in a totally good way. People love distinctive brands, after all.
Essential Tips to Improve Your Web Design
As promised, here are five simple things you can do to take your current web design to the next level:
- Have a simple, clean navigation
People and search engine bots alike would take a website that’s simple and easy to navigate any day over one that’s just all over the place.
Don’t give your visitors a hard time digging for what they’re looking for, or you’ll drive them away. The same goes for crawlers – the more URLs and barriers they’ll be sifting through, the lower they’ll rank you.
Simplify your URLs by keeping them short and sweet. Remove any duplicates and limit categories within your URLs if you can.
- Eliminate distraction and friction
Certain elements on a website, such as stocky images and complicated animations, tend to detract from the value and message a brand is attempting to convey.
If you’re guilty of incorporating them into your site, you should remove them so your visitors will get a clear idea of what your business is really all about.
- Keep it consistent
Consistency is key to an effective web design.
Displaying various design styles rather than sticking to one will only leave your visitors all confused and wondering where to go next other than the exit button.
Make sure that you pick the appropriate colors and fonts for your text and buttons, and that you’re using the exact headings, subheadings, and text sizes throughout your site.
- Speed up your loading time
Let’s face it. People these days no longer have the patience to wait for a site to load.
As a matter of fact, a 100-millisecond delay in load time can decrease conversions by 7%. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to convert leads just because your site took too long to load now, would you?
Not only that, but Google will also penalize you by dropping your ranking after seeing that users aren’t so fond of your website due to its speed.
- Use responsive design
You might recall us mentioning earlier about responsive design, and here is us explaining briefly about it.
As we’re now living in a world where everyone’s browsing the web using various mobile devices, it’s critical to use responsive design so you can stay on top of user expectations.
Not long ago, Google announced that it has gone mobile-first, rewarding websites that work well in every screen size and offer a pleasant experience for mobile users.
The Bottom Line
Whether your goal is to drive more quality traffic to your site or generate leads and convert them, having a good web design is the way to go. However, unless you have your own team of specialists, the task is really strenuous.
The good news is, you can always count on a digital marketing agency that specializes in West Palm Beach web design to get the job done for you! Trust us, it will be worth every penny!
