Modern business owners are well aware of how important an online presence is. Without an online presence, a business owner will be unable to reach a larger audience with their message. One of the main things you need in place to start growing your online presence is a well-designed website. A recent study found that nearly 75% of consumers equate a great web design with a company’s credibility.
Rushing through the web development process can lead to big problems occurring. Not only can a well-designed website help you attract attention from consumers, but it can also put your domain on the radar of popular search engines like Google.
Good Site Navigation is a Must
When developing your new website, you need to develop a list of goals. One of the main goals you should have when designing your website is creating a domain that is easy to navigate. If your website has difficult navigational elements, it will frustrate the people that use it. Not only can bad navigational elements prohibit your attempts to gain a larger following, it can also get in the way of search engine success. For instance, if you are using tons of Flash elements on your website, you will make crawling your website difficult for search engines.
Ideally, you want to make the content on your website easy to crawl. One of the best ways to do this is by using proper sentence structure, internal/external links, and shorter paragraphs. The easier it is for a search engine bot to crawl your website, the higher it will inevitably rank. Online marketing juggernaut Redesign recommends using sitemaps and scannable content to make a good impression on search engines. Working with marketing professionals is a great way to ensure these elements are used properly.
The Power of Image Optimization
A well-designed website uses both text and images to convey a message to consumers. One of the first things a person will notice about your website is the type of imagery you have in place. The biggest mistake most business owners make when it comes to the images they upload to their website is failing to compress the file size. High-definition images are typically housed in larger files. These large files can lead to website loading issues.
When a search engine crawls your website, they will be testing how fast it loads. If the images on your website aren’t optimized and compressed, they will slow down the loading process. Rather than allowing this to reduce your rank on search engines, you need to take action. Luckily, there are a number of programs online designed to help you reduce the size of your image files. With these programs, you can shrink image file sizes and speed up your website.
Mobile-Friendly Websites Perform Well On Search Engines
The number of people accessing websites from mobile devices grows with each passing year. As you start to design your website, you need to make sure that mobile users are going to be accommodated. In the past few years, Google has instituted a mobile-first indexing policy. This basically means that Google will pull the mobile version of a website when ranking it.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you will have an extremely hard time getting on the first page of search engine results. This is why you need to make sure your website is responsive. A responsive website is designed to appeal to people on all devices regardless of the screen size.
Without a responsive design, mobile users will have to resize images and text to view them. If a user has to do this amount of work to view your content, they will probably leave your website quickly. This is why you need to understand the importance of investing in a mobile-friendly web design.
Don’t Forget About High-Quality Content
Focusing solely on the look of your website is a bad idea. While website appeal is important when trying to rank high on search engines, you also need good content. In most cases, it is your content that will drive organic traffic to a website. If the content on your website is poorly written or devoid of relevant or popular keywords, you will struggle to rise above your online competition. This is why you need to realize just how important great content is to accomplishing your mission of search engine dominance.
The Google algorithm considers a number of factors when crawling and ranking website content. Keyword density, structure and links are some of the most important things you need to focus on when developing content for your website.
If you don’t know how to properly optimize the content on your website, then you need to consider hiring a marketing agency to assist you. A content marketing agency can create a consistent flow of high-quality content for your website for a reasonable fee. With their help, you can drive more organic traffic to your website in no time.
Social Proof Is Vital
Gaining the trust of both consumers and search engines is harder than it seems. If you want to make this job easier, then you need to compile and display social proof on your website. An overwhelming number of consumers look for online reviews before using the products/services an online business offers. One of the main things you need to do to make search engines take notice of your good reputation is to claim and optimize your Google My Business listing.
These listings allow you to post information about your business like hours of operation and location. Satisfied consumers can also generate positive reviews on this listing. When your business name is searched for, the Google My Business Listing will be prominently displayed. Embedding your website URL in this listing is a great way to drive more traffic to your domain.
Now that you know more about how to create an SEO-friendly website design, it is time to get to work. Allowing a knowledgeable web developer to handle the work involved in building a new website is the best way to avoid problems during this process.
