The quality of your website can have a major impact on the overall success of your SEO campaign. There are two major reasons for this:
First, popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo want to ensure their users are having a positive experience when utilizing their powerful search tools. To accomplish this goal, the top search results must include websites that not only contain information relevant to the user’s search query, but also provide the user with an engaging experience once on the site.
Second, websites must be able to convert visitors into leads and sales. A high quality, professionally designed website has a better chance of converting visitors into leads and sales than a poorly designed site with subpar functionality. Locking down first page rankings will be fruitless if your site turns off prospective customers.
How does your website stack up against your competition? Have your customers lauded their experience on your site? Do you feel like your online presence accurately represents the quality and success of your brand? Ensuring that your website provides your customers with a positive user experience will help you convert traffic from SEO and boost profitability; after all, business is going digital, and your website is your new storefront.
Invest in Professional Design
Having an attractive and professional design is one of the best ways to help your website stand out from your competition.
Captivating designs impress and engage users to increase the amount of time they spend interacting with your site. On the other hand, unappealing designs repel users with frustrating, nonsensical navigation and poorly optimized visuals. These issues commonly contribute to high bounce rates and a significant reduction in the time spent on your site. Over time, search engines will begin to perceive these negative signals as a result of a substandard user experience and reduce your site’s search rankings accordingly.
Additionally, people have powerful reactions to visuals and make strong, sometimes permanent, judgments based on first impressions. For this reason, you can expect lower search engine rankings and stifled conversion rates when supporting your brand online with an inferior website. If your website is unattractive or outdated, our agency can help you preserve the success of your SEO campaign while implementing a 360-degree site redesign.
Create Engaging Content
In order to provide users with a positive experience, your site must contain well-written content that meets the needs of your target audience. Users will succumb to frustration and leave your site if your content is irrelevant to their needs or poorly written.
Conversely, users will stay on your site longer, come back more often, and even share your content if it meets their expectations and is deftly written. So, focus on writing content for your target audience, not for search engines.
When you provide users with engaging content, not only will your site receive superior rankings, but the probability of users converting into customers will also increase.
Provide User-Friendly Navigation
Once a user finds your site, is impressed with its design, and engages with your content, the goal is to keep them on your site as long as possible since the more a user engages with your site, the more likely they are to convert into a lead or sale.
Providing users with a navigation structure that makes it easy for them to find additional relevant information is a key element of keeping users engaged. If users find it difficult to locate relevant content because your site’s navigation isn’t intuitive, they will likely give up, and move on to the next site. User-friendly navigation helps you procure “clicks” on your site. By making it simple for users to navigate to another page one or more times within your website, you reduce your bounce rate and provide your SEO campaign with a nudge in the right direction.
Ensure Fast Page Load Speeds
Have you ever clicked on a search result in Google only to find yourself staring at a blank white screen for what feels like an eternity? Did you wait for it to finish loading, or did you get frustrated and move on?
When it comes to your website, no matter how great the design or how engaging the content, slow page load speeds will drag your user-experience through the dirt. Both your rankings and conversion rates will suffer as a result of stunted load speeds.
The importance of investing in a quality hosting solution that provides fast page load speeds is often ignored. Cheap hosting can cost you in the form of suppressed rankings and a decrease in new customers, so a quality hosting solution is well worth the investment.
Conclusion
Effectively applying your business model to a digital framework is key to surviving in today’s digital economy. If a century-old company like Sears can file for bankruptcy as a direct result of competition from online retailers like Amazon, just imagine the effect on small businesses.
With a professional design, engaging content, user-friendly navigation, and fast page load speeds, your business can outshine your competition in the increasingly valuable digital space. Not only will these factors contribute to improved rankings, but they will also lead to higher conversion rates and ultimately more customers.
At Leverage Digital, we help you dominate your brand’s corner of the internet with responsive digital design that outclasses your competition, compelling content that drives SEO and user engagement, and industry-leading web support to ensure that your brand is always growing, day or night. Our holistic approach to marketing allows us to customize a superior marketing plan that helps you reach your objectives while building a solid foundation to drive your brand’s growth into the future.
