In business today, your website is much more than a brochure. You need to be able to compete with every other company in your niche. The way you do that is by understanding design principles that help you to double your traffic. This traffic can be from an ad to your site, from SEO results pages to your site, or even from the site itself onto your list or other marketing cohort. So use the principles below to maximize your results:
Responsiveness
Long gone are the days where the web was made up of ugly sites that were easy to navigate. Instead of just text and pictures, today’s web is a contest of beautiful design. However, that also means that it is more difficult for browsers to display.
When you add in the fact that most users today are on the web with their phones, you must understand that having a mobile-responsive site is a top priority. If you don’t have a website that displays properly on mobile, you will miss out on conversions, signups, sales, and more because users will get frustrated. In addition, you will be penalized from an SEO and even paid ads aspect as those companies have a vested interest in providing exceptional experiences.
Complex vs. Simple Elements
You might be excited about that new marketing video that your team put out. Perhaps you even have an interactive game or quiz on your website for engagement or qualifying purposes. While these things are great, they could be hurting your traffic.
Google will look at your page elements and attempt to crawl them with web bots. However, specific complex media like videos cannot be crawled. That means they can’t understand how relevant the content is. Make it a practice to transcribe videos especially, so you’re building a relevant context to receive more free traffic.
Amount of Text
The amount of text on your page will affect traffic. If your blog posts are too short, expect less traffic. Google likes to see longer posts with in-depth information. Always keep in mind that genuinely interested prospects will appreciate longer posts.
Relevance of Text on Page
While you need to make your posts longer in general, do not simply write for length just for the sake of it. If your words are not relevant to the audience, the search engines will discover this quickly. Thus, they won’t rank you as high, causing you to miss out on traffic you otherwise would have earned easily.
Filling out the Alt Tags
If you follow the steps above, then you will be in great shape for designing for the web in a way that draws more traffic and gives you a chance to convert. However, if you fail to fill out the alt tags in the HTML code of your site, Google will miss an opportunity to rank you slightly higher in usual searches. In addition, you’ll find that you won’t show up as much for image searches which are even more common with the way the world is moving to mobile usage today.
Making Sure Speed is Up to Par
Have you ever been to a page that loaded too slowly? You probably were frustrated right off the bat or perhaps even bounced away from the page, never to visit again.
Paid and organic search engines understand that users want speed. Even a few seconds delay is costly and creates annoyance in the minds of modern consumers. To counteract this, you need better hosting which serves your page faster. You can also compress your images on your site so that they still look great but don’t take as long to load using free tools.
Security Matters
Don’t let the name ‘web design’ fool you. It is not all about making things pretty. Making them functional is a strong priority as well. And even more is making sure users are not getting threatened by digital hackers, viruses, or scripting exploits.
There are a variety of ways that someone could gain access to your user’s system when they are on your site. Make sure you limit the type of code allowed in comment boxes, search boxes, and form submissions.
When it comes to getting more out of your website, you can’t afford to avoid the best strategies. You need to get more design working for you rather than against you on your site. That doesn’t necessarily mean better graphics. Instead, it means understanding the principles above and how they relate to getting more prospects into your funnel. So implement the advice above and watch your conversions rise.
Resources:
Leadgenix.com