5 stage plan for online success
1. Improve your website for conversions
Improving your existing website should not just be about a new look. Your website has to generate leads and ultimately deliver sales in a competitive marketplace.As well as developing a website design brief, we also take account of:
- Where your website currently ranks on search engines and for which keywords?
- What your best performing keywords are?
- What keywords your competitors are using and where they rank?
- Your calls to action and are they converting?
- Where visitors are leaving your website pages?
2. Design
Good design is about capturing the attention of your audience and guiding them to the most important messages on your website.Using images, illustrations and infographics is a great way of getting your message across. Web designers will use these elements to provide immediate impact, maintain users’ interest and help them to navigate around the site.
UX and UI (user experience and user interface) are about knowing how to blend functionality with creativity. This will provide easy navigation and a design that is informative and interactive by using animation (motion) and video where relevant. UX also includes technical aspects of the page such as fast loading speed and SEO content.
Modern design is moving towards more white space and uncluttered pages to make it easier for the user to find your most important messages, links and calls to action.
With mobile accounting for around 50% of internet traffic and rising year on year, your website design must be fully responsive and intuitive to use on a mobile device.
You only have a few seconds to make a good impression and convince visitors they will find what they are looking for when they land on your website.
3. Content
An effective content marketing strategy costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3 times as many leads.To give your words maximum impact and help tell your story, your content should guide the design of your website. Your content needs to:
- Convert visitors
- Perform well for organic searches
- Represent your current brand values and latest information
- Be original
- Be well written with good grammar, checked for plagiarism and spell-checked
- Include your best-performing keywords
- Be regularly updated and added to.
4. Website page structure
Using your keyword researched content, you should establish an effective page flow for your information by using:- Your most searched keywords in the header and subtitles to break the page up into manageable sections
- Bullet points to quickly get your facts across to the reader
- Hyperlinks that click through to more information on other pages to help users navigate the site
- Calls to action on pages to encourage users to click through to a checkout, find more information or complete an enquiry form.
Calls to action
CTAs work more effectively if you can offer the reader something of interest or value. If they sign up to your newsletter or fill in your enquiry form, offer a discount or an E-book that visitors will gain some value from.
Tell your story more effectively by providing well-structured pages that will help users find the information they need and take action.
5. Continuous improvement
New content added to your website will keep your pages up to date for your customers and provide more information for search engines to improve the ranking of your pages (Search Engine Optimisation - SEO).An ideal way to add new content is with blog or news articles. Search marketing is an essential element of the continual improvement of your website page rankings. Regular posting of informative articles on your blog and reviewing and optimising your existing web page content is the most effective way to achieve this.
Without continuous work to improve and add content to your site, it will not be found on the web unless users already know your brand.