Every business needs to market itself properly to be successful. Whether the firm is just starting out or it’s an established business, the importance cannot be stressed enough. What many companies tend to overlook is the impact of web design on the overall marketing performance. The simple truth is that web design can make or break your campaign. While the marketing techniques might be credited for bringing the users to the site, the excellent web design techniques are what will keep them there and even make you money.
Companies can decide to redesign their website for one reason or the other. However, most of these websites tend to be worse than their predecessors since they usually focus on a single aspect of their digital marketing strategy as opposed to looking at the plan as a whole. The quality of a website’s design both on its front and back end is instrumental to certain aspects of digital marketing. In this article, we’ll focus on showing how great website design is crucial to having a successful digital marketing campaign.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is one of the reasons most companies redesign their websites. Particularly for businesses that have had websites for a while now, they find that their current state of design isn’t doing them any favors when it comes to ranking on search engines. Since the advent of Panda, many companies have rushed to eliminate instances of duplicate content on their website since it is a major rankings killer.
Duplicate content majorly originates from three instances; duplicate product descriptions of similar items on eCommerce sites, automatically generated duplicate pages and finally blog categories and news pages that derive content from the posts themselves. While the last instance is easily amendable with simple ‘noindex, nofollow’ tags, the other two need to be addressed during the design phase of the website. In the instance where there are duplicate product descriptions, you might consider having all these goods or services placed under one general overview with the differences in specifications addressed under individual products do keep redundancy low.
In terms of back-end design, many websites don’t have a provision for creating customized Meta Descriptions, Alt tags, and the rest. Without incorporating these elements, a website’s SEO performance will naturally lag behind the competition.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Every business wants to have a high conversion rate, but not many want to do the work associated with this. To improve the CRO of any website, it needs to focus on two major aspects; simplicity and authority. The way a website feels to the user is a huge determining factor that will dictate whether the visitor will want to do business with you. Taking the example of a law firm, would you trust one with a shoddy looking website to handle your legal work? No, you wouldn’t. This applies to any other business. It is important to show prospective clients that you mean business by having a website that looks good and oozes authority. The site should also be simple enough that it doesn’t compromise on user experience and site speed which are major ranking factors.
User Experience (UX)
A site’s design has a significant impact when it comes to UX. The main aspects of design UX are concerned with is how simple it is for users to navigate through your website and also how fast is your website’s response time. The simplicity of navigation is critical to the success of any internet site. This is what will keep the client on the site once they’ve gotten there. Another aspect of user experience should be the ease of which visitors can get the information they need. By implementing designs that favor quick searches and excellent readability, your site visitors can find any information and digest it as fast as possible. It’s also worth mentioning here that website responsiveness also falls under UX. With more users going mobile, you need to have a website that is adaptive to the screen it’s being viewed on so that the user has the best possible experience and doesn’t struggle to get to where they want.
