People usually believe that web designing is all about building a website that looks aesthetically pleasing. Although this is a part of it, it’s not the only thing that web designing entails.
When it comes to an integrated marketing plan for your brand, website design is no longer just about its visual appeal. It’s the details that lead to how your users will perceive and interact with your brand, your online visibility and exposure, and the ease with which your users and search engines navigate through your website.
Keep reading to explore how website design affects your SEO and overall branding efforts.
Why Your Website Design Is Important
A well-designed website can significantly impact your business success in tangible ways like increased sales and business leads. It can constantly work to support the brand. Moreover, it’s easier to monitor its effectiveness as compared to other marketing efforts or initiatives.
Brands can better understand consumer behaviour and motivation by tracking their online activity. It, therefore, provides them quick insight into what’s working and what isn’t.
Let’s explore the ways in which website design can impact your brand and overall marketing effort.
You Can Use It to Bring Differentiation
An important aspect of brand building is how you create some unique features for your brand that sets it apart from your competitors. As an online hub for customers, your website is an excellent platform that gives you the opportunity to build a unique brand image. It can make or break customers’ perception of your brand.
If a website is outdated or unappealing, it’s highly likely to experience high bounce rates. It may seem convenient to build a website by using a standard template and put in your business information and just be done with it. However, it may potentially damage your business.
A website should tell your brand’s unique story. It should align visuals and content, making an impact on both the consumer and the market that will stay in their minds and won’t be forgotten very soon.
Improving Your User Experience
Great user experience is determined by the design of the website. A clear layout and carefully designed website creates a journey for the user to easily engage, explore and interact with the brand. This ease of use becomes part of your brand identity as well.
Building meaningful impressions consequently reflects on your bottom line, overall brand objectives, and customer service levels. Therefore, you need to ensure the ideal user experience by using user-testing techniques such as A/B testing. These are critical to determining the success of your website.
The Relationship between SEO and Website Design
SEO is utilized to increase the number of visitors to a website by achieving a higher position or rank in the search engine results. Website design is crucial for better SEO so that your website’s online visibility and reach is improved.
Some of the best SEO practices include incorporating the right keywords and links into the website and continuously refreshing them to stay up-to-date. This way, you can increase your visibility in the search results by actively updating your web content and design.
Let’s take a deeper look into the details of SEO and website designing.
Web Design Elements That Can Influence Your SEO
SEO begins with web design. You can stay competitive by integrating a few factors that can effectively improve your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.
Google gauges the value of your website through bounce rates and time-on-site. An SEO agency can help you understand and implement certain factors that can increase your website’s ranking. Here are a few basics.
Crafting the Right Title Tag
An HTML title tag is the first thing that users see on the search results. This is what helps them identify whether your website matches their search intent. The title tag should contain well-researched keywords, ideally at the beginning of the tag, and it must not be more than 50-60 characters long. You can use dividers to separate elements like locations or categories.
H1 Tags Are Very Important
Headers tags are important for website designing. They give users a glimpse of what the web page is about. Even though there are different levels of heading tags ranging from H1 to H6, the H1 tag carries the most weight. It should be optimized for the major keywords and used only once as Google only wants to see one H1 tag.
Meta Descriptions
These may not affect your SERP ranking, but they certainly have an impact on the click-through rates. Meta descriptions tell your audience what your page is about in a little more detail. It must be highly informative, concise, and not spammed with the unnatural use of keywords.
Page Content
You need to make sure your content is readable and thoroughly optimized. The title tags, URLs, heading tags and meta descriptions act like a teaser. It’s the page content that determines whether your users will stay on your website, navigate through pages, and stay engaged.
Carefully placed CTAs (calls-to-action), ease of navigation and aesthetics like colours and images are very important to grasp your user’s interest and attention for longer and obtain high conversion rates.
It’s a no-brainer that the content itself should also be useful, relevant, and informative.
Optimizing images
This involves choosing the right image format and resizing the images to improve their aesthetics. In addition, naming the images and adding alternative text tags have SEO value as Google relies on them to recognize images.
Mobile First Indexing
Keeping in mind how mobile users have significantly outnumbered desktop users, Google rolled out its Mobile-First Index in 2018. According to this, the mobile version of your website becomes the starting point of how Google determines your website’s ranking.
Therefore, your website design should be responsive and should be fluid enough to adapt to different screens and devices.
Website design has more far-reaching effects than how it looks on the surface. With a well-strategized website design, a company can effectively leverage positive brand image, increase its online visibility and translate these factors into business success.
Emerald Colour is a full-service marketing agency that specializes in providing web design services. Contact us today to utilize the power of strong website design to add value to your business.
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by Richard Kearsey
source: SiteProNews
