At the center of any digital marketing strategy is a website where prospects from various traffic sources land and interact with the business. No matter how engaging your marketing content is, users will likely click out and find solutions elsewhere if the website is not aligned with all the promotional hype. So before investing in digital marketing, ensure you have a useful and easy-to-use site set up. Here are a few tips that might come in handy for you:
Simplify navigation
Navigation refers to the process of moving from one page to another on a website. If the navigation is difficult, new users won’t have the patience to continue looking for information on your website. That will increase your bounce rate and lower your SERP ranking. While it’s worthwhile focusing on being informative, it’s equally important to make it easy for users to find that information. You can do it yourself if you have the know-how or hire a professional web designer to organize the website for you.
Make your business website mobile-friendly
Smartphones rule the device world, and failure to optimize your website for mobile users can put your business at a massive competitive disadvantage. Just so you know, Google recently introduced a mobile-first indexing system where the mobile version of a website’s content is prioritized for ranking. Web designers are thus advised to ensure everything — from their site’s navigation and page load speeds to textual content, images, infographics, and videos — appears and works as smoothly on mobile as it does on desktop.
Simplify
Simplicity is a winning strategy when it comes to web design. Effective pages contain minimal information and tackle no more than one subject. A de-cluttered and straightforward page is easy to go through for skimmers and much more aesthetically appealing. Ensure your web design is based on a minimalistic approach, and your information is spread across several pages rather than crammed in a handful.
Install plugins
Plugins help web designers increase the functionality of a website without writing additional code. While too many of them can clutter and even lower your page load speeds, there are some that your websites ought to have regardless of your CMS. We recommend the following:
Yoast SEO for onsite WordPress SEO optimization
Disqus for comment management
Floating Social Bar to display online presence
Follow design trends
The thing about trends is that they can go out of fashion one morning and leave your website looking out-of-date. On the other hand, if you use them correctly, you are bound to drive more traffic to your site. The best thing to do is to update your design as regularly as possible. It might set you back a few bucks, but it will bring in more if you get other aspects of your web design right, of course.
Endnote
Your website is the heartbeat of your business’s online presence. Don’t lag behind by sticking to conventional operation methods or creating a website for the sake of it. The above tips will help you build a website that is attractive both to search engines and humans and ensure you get the most out of your web presence.