Although branding goes beyond the aesthetics and layout of your website, the design of your site significantly impacts your business.
Therefore, by extension, your website's ranking and ability to convert visitors to customers is determined by how well users interact with your website. In simpler words, your website's design is a serious marketing strategy, and ought to be taken so.
So, it's time to stop seeing your website and marketing as two different parallels. Research so far proves otherwise. The two go hand in hand and you obviously should put more thoughts into building your website beyond just having an online presence.
The truth is, an increasing number of people go online today to do intensive research before making a purchase. With that in mind, you may be doing your business more harm than good if you're not intentional about managing your website.
Here is a crucial point to keep in mind. Your competitors are putting more strategy in how their websites generate new customers, influence the action of visitors, and retain existing clients and visitors.
The content, design, and structure of your website impact your business in more ways than you can imagine.
Do You Need To Invest In Your Website?
While we do not need to bother asking if your business needs a great website or not, it would help to keep things in perspective. According to a report by Statista, almost 4.57 billion people were active internet users as of April 2020. That's way more than half of the world's population today.
An earlier study stated that there are about 1.66 billion people who go online to make purchases in 2016, and this number is expected to grow beyond 2.14 billion people by 2021.
There are also some cases where people go online to check out available options before visiting a store or supermarket. In other words, businesses that are online stand better chances against competitors who are not. But that's just basic, as far as doing business today goes.
Even those who do not have websites yet, rely heavily on social media engagements to stay in business. Instead, the focus has shifted a bit. In some other business reports, it is believed that 88% of online shoppers wouldn't return to a website after lousy user experience.
Again, 70% of online businesses fail simply because of bad user experience. So, it's not just enough to own a website; there's more for your business beyond that.
One thing that many website owners end up doing is hiring a web development agency that can handle everything from building the site to managing the site.
How Does Web Design Impact SEO?
Any business which intends to gain market penetration, generate leads, and achieve more conversions needs to provide great user experience. Aside from content and aesthetics, your website design is another strong factor that affects how your site performs online.
This impact isn't just on SEO but also the number of visitors and conversion rates. Unfortunately, many businesses have yet to realize the importance of web design to SEO efforts. In essence, web design goes further beyond the aesthetics of the website.
First and foremost, your website's design involves the beauty, structure, and ease of navigation for users. The beautiful designs will engage the visitors, but the structure makes it easy or difficult for them to find what they're looking for.
If you are like me and not the best when it comes to graphics, you can always hire a web design team to work on various aspects of your website.
Some websites, for example, are well built for computers but are not optimized for mobile devices. This inevitably leads to poor user experience. So, creating an engaging website encompasses a friendly user interface across all devices.
When developing your website, it's all right to follow trends, but it's more important to stick to the structures that search engines are more inclined to crawl.
Knowing how the elements and structures incorporated in building your website influence how search engine spiders crawl and index your site will inform better decisions. Ignoring this could be a disadvantage for your business.
How Does Web Design Impact Branding?
If you have a great website, then you are already doing some branding. It's much easier to see how your website's design affects the branding of your business. Unlike the intricate nature of the relationship between SEO and web design, seeing web design from the perspective of branding is a lot easier.
However, it takes some serious work and investment to achieve great branding. Within the first few seconds that every visitor spends on your website, you can be sure that they already formed an opinion of your website. That impression or opinion determines if they'd spend another second on your website or bolt for good.
Many businesses lose their leads to competitors because of web design. Did you know that 75% of visitors to a particular site will base their judgment on the site's credibility purely on its aesthetics?
You'll be shocked to know that a myriad of brands on the internet offers the same services or products as you. Making your website appealing not only stimulates the audience but also ensures that they stay hooked to your content and eventually respond to your call to action.
Another important aspect of web design for branding is in the ease of navigation. You don't want to leave your visitors wondering where and how to use it on your website.
Did you know that about 53% of mobile site visitors will leave any page that takes longer than three seconds to load? More annoying is having a blog or website that's bloated all over with ads and pop-ups.
Without hesitation, most visitors will abandon such websites and search for more appealing websites. Mostly, you want to mount the best impression for your business online. If possible, hire someone who knows what they're doing to assist with building a website that leaves users with the best perception of your brand.
Essential Factors To Consider In Web Design
In line with the need to excel in search engine optimization and improve branding, there are several points to take note of when building a website for your business.
Content
The Importance of content can hardly be overemphasized, not just for web design but for your SEO metrics. Over and over again, the content will beat beauty as far as keeping your audience engaged and interested. A beautiful website that offers no content is much less appealing than a site that continually uploads helpful content on a regular basis.
In a study conducted by Joseph Putnam on Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Site, he found that 94% of respondents based their mistrust in the design elements of a website, while only 6% mentioned content. In other words, people are more likely to stay on a website because of content than aesthetics.
Besides, search engines will see your website as spam if it has all the attractive perks, but lacks content. This inevitably diminishes your visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Colors
The layout of your texts and the colors used in designing your website has far-reaching effects - on your branding and brand perception.
While it is naturally the norm to stick to the colors of your business logo, it is advisable to design your site with appealing colors. In this area, you want to rely on the experience and expertise of professionals.
Include a CTA
Whether you understand it or not, your website should be designed with marketing in mind. After all, the essence of the website is for visibility. So why not maximize what you can achieve there. As much as you can, include a call to action (CTA), where necessary. This is how you get the audience to go or stay where you want them.
So, it would be best if you made a conscious effort to introduce your products and services to the visitors in the most appealing ways possible. If well implemented, you can be sure of increased traffic, more leads, and more conversions and sales.
Easy Navigation
As mentioned earlier, you want to avoid leaving your potential clients frustrated or lost on your website. Things must be structured well and simple. Within the first few seconds of staying on a particular site, a user can decide whether to stay.
Even if they did stay, the chances that they will return are very low. So, it is not enough to build a website that is easy to find on the web, but more importantly, it should offer users the best experience.
In summary, remember that a fantastic website generates referrals on its own without any marketing efforts. Therefore, excellent web design is an effective way to build your brand and enhance SEO.
If you are interested in hiring a solid SEO agency, check out some of our recommendations here.
