Category: Website Design

People are ditching laptops and using their cell phones to shop, pay bills, and do research. There’s no need to find a PC to do what you need on the world wide web. The beauty of using a smartphone is that you can access the internet anytime and anywhere. Businesses realize the importance of ensuring their webpage is mobile optimized.

If your customers cannot easily read and shop from their phones, then you could be missing out on much-needed revenue. If you’re on the fence about spending the money on mobile optimization, here are some things to consider.

Good for SMS Marketing

Things have changed over the past decade. According to Podium, a majority of online traffic comes from mobile devices, so by using SMS marketing, you can reach potential customers on a platform where people are looking for messages, which can help you get ahead of the competition. Utilizing SMS text messages can help take your business to a whole new level.

If you’re having a sale or want to update a customer on their order status, you can simply send a text. Millennials would rather get a text than an email or robocall. You must reach them where they live, and today’s generation is always on their cell phones. So as a company, you must adapt your marketing and sales tactics to trends in society.

Higher Search Engine Ranks

One of the main goals of any marketing department is to improve SEO. Did you know that having a mobile-friendly website will allow you to have higher search engine rankings? Just think of all the ways that an increased position can affect your business.

Most consumers look at the first page of web results when they do a search. If your company is not in the top 10, then you are not going to get the desired level of traffic. However, if you are showing up in the top spots, you will have increased interest, which will turn into enhanced revenue.

Easier to Manage

Since more than half of the population is shopping from a cell phone, you need to ensure that your page is optimized to meet that need. Many companies feel that it’s mysterious and difficult to optimize their websites. However, it’s not at all challenging, and it’s a whole lot easier to manage than a dedicated app.

Your IT department must adjust your current website’s content so that it is user-friendly across a mobile platform. Once optimized, the goal is to have content that flows effortlessly between both desktop and mobile devices. The result is the customer gets an outstanding experience.

Consumers Expect It

One of the most significant reasons that you need to have your website mobile-optimized is to meet your customers’ expectations. If you’re trying to shop and a website won’t load properly on your phone, then you will go to a site with elevated service. Without optimization, your site will be challenging to navigate on anything other than a computer or tablet. Do you want to miss out on all those potential customer interactions and sales?

Improve the User Experience

There are so many things that you can do on your site that will enhance the user experience. For starters, you can put a button where they can click to call your office. By simply touching the area on their screen, their cell phone will dial your number. You can also put a virtual assistant that can chat with them and all sorts of other features. You want to make sure that potential customers can utilize the full offerings of your site without putting down their phones.

Customers Stay on Your Site Longer

According to Crazy Egg, the average consumer spends just over two minutes on a website. The longer they are on your site, the more interested they are in your products or services. Now, if you have all sorts of features to keep them engaged, they will spend more time exploring your offerings.

The goal is to increase the time a potential customer spends looking around. If you increase your rankings, then you are going to get traffic that is eager to learn about your company. So, you want them to spend as much time as possible engaging with your site, and mobile optimization is the tool that can make it happen.

Don’t become overwhelmed by the thought of making some changes to your website for the use of mobile phones. The money you spend to utilize mobile optimization is worth every penny. Not only will you have improved SEO, but you will have customers that come to your site ready to learn and shop with your company. It’s a valuable way to enhance the customer experience, and, over time, it will improve your bottom line.

Looking for a beautiful website for your company? Let Eleven Tree Media design it for you!

Organic search performance and web design are intrinsically linked. In other words, web design has a direct impact on a website’s ability to rank higher for specific search terms. This is one area that most businesses fail to take advantage of. Often, the marketing and design teams work in isolation. In some cases, the marketing team is brought on board when the website is already running.

When SEO is overlooked during the design stage, it can cause ranking challenges down the line.  From an SEO point of view, a well-designed site should take into consideration the following strategies.

Design With Users in Mind

The goal of any search engine is to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for. This means that search engines reward websites that offer the best user experience. They are avoiding a situation where a user visits a site only to find it frustrating to use.

Good design is not be limited to desktop usability. Mobile friendliness is equally essential in improving the user experience. Website responsiveness is an absolute must for your site to rank well in organic search.

Good user experience translates to longer time spent on the site, a significant amount of social shares, and a high number of quality inbound links. These factors are what search engines see as an indication of good usability. Consequently, they reward you with a better rank.

Basically, a well-designed website will engage visitors once on the site. A/B testing is, therefore, crucial various to assess user experience. Presentation of content is also essential. There is always a temptation to add more content, but doing this just adds clutter to the design. Of more importance is the relevance of your content to the intended audience.

Optimize Indexable Content

Despite the advancement in crawling technology, search engines are still limited in the way they interpret content. The way you look at your website may not be the same as how search engines see it. To rank well on organic search, you should ensure the most important content is in HTML text format. Non-text content such as Flash files, images, and applets are ignored by the crawlers. This doesn’t mean that you can’t design a video or image-rich site that rank well in search engines.

There are various strategies you can use to solve this problem:

• Provide alt text for images and videos. These are the HTML text that gives search engines a description of multimedia content.
• Supplement Java applets and Flash with text.
• Provide a transcription for audio and video content if the information is meant to be used in ranking.
• Provide navigation and crawlable links to supplement search boxes on the site. Please note that search engines do not use search boxes on the site to find content.

Improve on the Crawlable Link Structure

Search engines crawlers need to see the links on your site to find the information and rank pages. Having a crawlable link structure will, therefore, help Google crawlers to find all relevant pages on your site. Hindering their ability to browse the pathways of your site will make it hard for Google to list your web pages in their indexes.

All your other efforts like good keyword targeting, using quality content and smart promotion will not get you results if the crawlers fail to find different pages on your site. Here are some of the reasons why crawlers may not find your pages.

Using JavaScript to Embed Links

Search engines either give less priority to links in unparseable JavaScript or they do not crawl such links. All the essential links should be in standard up-to-date HTML.

Protected Pages

If your users need to login or complete an online form to access the content, then search engines may not see the protected pages.

Links to Blocked Pages

The robot.txt file and the Meta Robots tag allow site owners to block crawlers from accessing specific pages. While these directives may give you control over who accesses your site, you may unintentionally block search engines from crawling on particular pages.

Frames and Iframes

Generally, search engines crawl links embedded in both iframes and frames. However, it’s best to avoid these two if you do not have good technical knowledge on how to optimize them for the search engine.

On-Page Optimization

Search engines still use keywords in their algorithms. So, you can adopt some strategies on keyword usage to create well-optimized pages. The strategies include:

• Use the keyword phrase at least once on the title tag. The title is meant to be accurate, descriptive, and precise, so be mindful of the length and placement of keywords:
• Use the keyword phrase once near the top of the page.
• Use keyword phrase at least two times in the body copy. You should also consider a variation of the keyword phrase.
• Use the keyword phrase at least once in the alt attribute of one of the images on the page. This will help to boost ranking through image search.
• Use keyword phrase at least once or two times in the Meta description tag. The search engines do not rank pages using Meta descriptions, but using the keyword in the descriptions will help to attract the attention of searchers.
• Use the keyword phrase once in the URL. However, you should not go overboard by stuffing multiple keywords in the same URL.

Strategic Analysis

Every successful business website takes into consideration the company’s mission and relevant business-critical keywords and usually done strategically. If you were to conduct a strategic analysis of most websites that fail to rank well on search engines, you will discover that SEO is only considered after the design is complete.

Additionally, another way of structuring your organic search strategy is to look at what your competition is doing and try to imitate it. This technique can inform both your onsite and offsite SEO strategy.

Gaining clarity on the purpose of the business and customers is vital in designing strategic SEO framework. This way, it is easy to assess how different elements of your website design affect business success. Doing a strategic analysis will help you answer several strategic questions:

• How do you intend to communicate your mission through your website?
• Do you understand your customers and your digital competitors?
• What are your business goals and how do you intend to achieve them?

Doing a strategic analysis will also help you decide on the technical aspects of design such as:

• Which programming language will you use?
• How scalable is your current set up?
• How will you engage the audience, or how will you create a compelling user experience?

Apart from the above, you should also decide on the page speed, language, and locations, content hierarchy.

Conclusion

Designing a search engine friendly website is the first step towards ranking well on the search engines. Unfortunately, most business owners or webmasters are not aware of the real impact of design on SEO or how long an SEO strategy can take. They tend to focus more on creating high-quality content and other SEO strategies, but fail to address the design and strategic aspects of SEO.