The best people in digital marketing know how good search engine optimization (SEO) drives traffic to a website. Increasingly, solid SEO has given ground to canny content design.
While SEO can bring customers to your business virtually, it doesn’t necessarily boost conversion rates in and of itself. This has served to underscore the utility of good web design for raising profits.
According to Albert Scaglione, founder and CEO of Park West Gallery, “Artistic composition on your website can have a lot of influence on how your potential customers feel about your brand and service.” Here are some ways to do just that.
Get the data
Google Analytics is a free service that will empower you to understand how your viewers interact with your site. Knowing how long users stay on each page and what they do while they are there will enable you to optimize your content.
Content that inspires little to no interaction is clearly not serving conversion, so you’ll want to tweak it wherever you see that’s happening. This is one of the primary ways that websites track the return on investment (ROI) for their SEO dollars.
A successful website is not a set-it-and-forget-it revenue generator; it requires constant monitoring and adjustments to become and remain successful. With the tools available, even a small business can create a website that brings in customers.
Readability
Readability is of course critical to the success of your website. Users will typically spend only a few seconds looking at each page before choosing to move on if it doesn’t pique their interest.
If a page has a thoughtful color scheme, good fonts, and a prominent logo, this tends to lengthen the time users spend on it, and ultimately determines whether users will purchase goods and services from the site.
Researching fonts that promote easy reading and work well together, and using contrast and white space to the best effect, will pay off in higher conversion and better user experience for your prospective customers. You may have to hire a web designer that has a track record of building clean, easy-to-read web pages.
Good designers are aware that eye-tracking studies show most people have a bias toward the left side of webpages. They know other useful information about how to organize imagery and text on the web.
It’s becoming increasingly vital to optimize content for mobile devices. A properly designed mobile site will be easy to read and visually pleasing for all those people who are surfing the Web on their hand-helds.
Enhance the user experience for higher conversion
Ultimately, every function and aesthetic facet of a webpage matters. Not only should the content be easy to read, but all functions, including links, should be in solid working condition.
The state of many companies’ websites is woeful, to say the least.
A firm will never achieve its desired ROI if its website is not user-friendly. Time spent on a SEO strategy will be wasted if the customer cannot navigate or conduct a transaction with ease on your website.
Good website design means understanding that the users’ experience with the site shapes their perception of your brand as a whole.
Know your audience
The analytics tools cited above will allow your business to understand who its customers are, so you should use this information as much as possible. By creating a persona for the customers in your target market segment, you should be able to tailor your website to the experience that’s most relevant for the individuals you want your business to reach.
It goes further than that, though; your company should also look to place the content where your ideal customers are likely to look for it. Once a tailored experience is created for them, users have to be able to go and get it on the Web without too much hassle or guesswork.
Aesthetics drive conversion in digital marketing. Ensuring a pleasant customer experience is one of the most important functions on a business website.
Don’t let all that SEO work go to waste. Make sure your website looks its very best.
