If you’ve struggled to get results from your website, you may be considering a complete site redesign. If you’re just starting out, you might not be sure how to create a website design that contributes to your business goals.
Your website has a direct impact on your digital marketing strategy. Understanding the factors that lead to online success (or failure) gives you the tools you need to maximize the return on your website design investment.
Website Marketing Challenges
Many businesses make the mistake of creating websites that don’t have their key objectives in mind. Worse yet, site redesigns can result in websites that perform poorly. When designing a website that supports your digital marketing efforts, it’s important to consider all the elements of your strategy. These different parts work together as a whole, and your website design should reflect this.
Websites and Branding
Your website must also reflect the values, mission, and philosophy of your business. These and other factors are what constitute your brand. Your branding efforts will define the experience that users have with your website, products, and services. It’s a good idea to revisit your company’s core values. Who does your business serve? Why does it serve them? How do you deliver value? There are many questions that can be answered when planning the ways in which your website represents your brand.
This makes your website a powerful tool in supporting your brand and giving you better results from your marketing efforts.
The SEO Foundation
Search engine optimization (SEO) is still the foundation of any successful business website. But your website must have the back-end requirements that allow you to achieve high rankings in Google and other search engines.
You need to include the necessary information in your site’s page URLs, alt tags, and meta descriptions. These are basic SEO practices that must be implemented on your website. Your site’s design needs to incorporate these and other elements to achieve consistent SEO results.
User Experience
The user experience (UX) of your website has a significant impact on your digital marketing strategy. It should be easy and intuitive for visitors to navigate through your site. Pages should load quickly and without errors. Site loading speed is a critical factor in search engine rankings. Faster Internet speeds require business websites to keep up with the expectations of today’s online users. Using large images and file sizes reduces its speed and is detrimental to your site’s UX.
You should regularly audit your website design to ensure that this and other UX factors are fully optimized. Large files should be compressed and navigation should be made as efficient as possible. Although the look of your website can be important to your brand, too much can get in the way of the user’s experience and prevent you from meeting their needs. This increases bounce rates and reduces the frequency of return visits.
Knowing how your website impacts your digital marketing strategy helps you avoid many of the common mistakes that are made by businesses.
If you think your website isn’t supporting your marketing strategy, let us know where you’re struggling in the comments section below. Every website design is unique to the goals and needs of each business. We’ll help you develop a customized strategy to design a website that supports your objectives and builds a successful brand for the future.