Many people are tempted to use a bargain-basement designer, but the saying is true “If it’s cheap, you’ll probably pay twice.” So when it comes to hiring a web designer, there are a number of benefits to hiring a great web designer who makes stellar website designs.
→ Expert Branding. You already know how important branding is. Hopefully! Effective website design will exude your business’ brand and help bring it to life online. Poor design work will be negative for your brand, as it will be too generic and unfortunately forgettable. This will cost you customers and help propel your competitors to new heights.
→ Professional Image. Not hiring a professional designer to design your new website will make your branding elements looking sloppy and untrustworthy. Think about it: Is that the message you want to send to new and existing customers?
→ Forward-thinking Adaptability. Great web design takes into account the inevitable – the need to adapt over time. You’ll want it to be easy to make regular edits, updates, and additions — for both your visitors and the search engines. Keeping your site functional and your content relevant is important for the shelf-life of your brand online — and for your bottom line.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
A positive, working experience on your website will lead to happy visitors. Promoting ease-of-use, brand retention, positive brand awareness, brand spread, and appeal will ensure repeat visits.
Your design will dictate the overall experience. Your design will dictate the ways in which people navigate your site.
A General Definition of web design:
The actual layout and the presentation of content as it will appear on the web.
Sending Strong Signals Magnifies Value
Look beyond your logo in regards to your brand. Your brand is not just your logo. User experience on the site is all part of building positive brand awareness and experience. Your website design should illustrate that via aesthetics. The design dictates ease-of-use, simplicity and value.
Don’t design around what you value in regards to your product (or message). Your design should convey the values of your audience so that they feel that their time is well-spent.
You have goals for your website; the entire website should be designed around facilitating the paths to reach your goals, while satisfying the needs and desires of your target audience.
First impressions count, be sure that the site layout and content is directly appealing to your specific audience.
More Strong Signals to be Aware Of And To Consider:
• Balance is important. This includes balancing text with graphics or implementing other digital as- sets with each other and/or text in a logical yet appealing manner. Too heavy a hand on one or the other, and the visitor experience is diminished; subsequently your site traffic can suffer.
• The careful use of ‘balance’ can make even small amounts of content incredibly impactful.
• In line with balance, think quality, not quantity. This can apply to the use of images, text, and/or video whether stock or not.
• Your logo should expertly define what your company does, convey who you are, and what your service or niche is. It should be prominent, memorable, but it shouldn’t take away from the message delivery that leads to your goals.
• A clean, and clear interface will both appease, and help the visitor. Unintuitive and multiple-step processes to find a means to an end will frustrate the user.
• Any consumable text should be readable (think font size), nobody wants to use a magnifying glass.
• Your most important calls-to-action or most frequently used interactive (and when I say ‘interactive’ this can mean links to important pages) items should reside above the fold.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
Strong websites deliver on an expectation, while being reinforced by the experience.
Having a good website experience is satisfying and memorable. Isn’t that what you want for your visitors? People who have a difficult time navigating your site, who aren’t engaging with information, who are bombarded with wildly abundant advertising, or getting time-crushed by a slow website will do very little to escalate a website owner to market-share success.
Don’t Occupy the Internet: Dominate It
You don’t want to just occupy the Internet, you want to dominate it. Make it happen through a valued, positive experience, and your stories about the road to success will be rich with tales of visitor happiness (and who knows you could get a nice testimonial to use on your site).
Think about it, you have your own experiences on the web that help distinguish clarity from static, as do your website visitors (those of today and the potentials waiting to find your website tomorrow).
In a world where the average attention span is less than two minutes, we need to eliminate the waiting. Are you waiting for your audience to visit your site or are potential visitors waiting to find your website? If you’re the one waiting, be prepared to keep waiting. Waiting is a good indicator of the need for improvement. Waiting is also a warning sign of being reactive rather than proactive.
Sending Strong Signals = More Visitors
Let’s not get too philosophical about it, but the bottom line is this: if you are not sending out strong web signals, your audiences is definitely not finding them. Instead, they are finding your competitors, and well that is not good for you or your brand. Surely you think your product or message is better, right? Treat it so!
But My Competitors are Horrible!
Okay, so your audience has found your competitors and have run into a poor experience. In that case, your potential audience is actually waiting to find you. In the meantime, they’re engaging with second or third best (or worse — and trust us, they aren’t at all happy about it).
This then is your opportunity to shine, so partner with an agency to make it happen. But remember, the more they are frequenting your competitors’ websites, the more you’re missing out on the opportunity to deliver meaningful experiences and negating your chances for success. It’s like a war for traffic and brand loyalty — let’s win it and move on, shall we?
You Have Questions, We Know You Do
Is your website frustrating visitors? Do you know? Are you making people want to leave, resulting in being a testimonial for your competitors? Is there too much/too little content? These are questions you need to ask web professionals, analytics, and your visitors. That’s when you can start planning for the future, planning for success.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
You monitor your website’s analytics, but the real problem is now what do you do with the data?
Follow this three-step plan to make the most of your site’s analytics.
Define the Audience Need(s)
People buy a specific product or service because if fills a specific need. When you are able to identify that need, you can then create an experience to address that need. Analytics are able to provide clues as to what those needs are. They can provide clues about your customers as to their interests, how they accessed the site, do they tend to consume more short-form or long-form content, do they watch the videos on your site, and how long do they spend on your site doing what.
Establish Baseline Conversions
It’s important to know your conversion rates. Analytics will not only help you establish your baseline conversions, but you will also be able to know the conversion rates from different sources of traffic. You will be able to determine that an ad on one site may perform at a much higher rate than other sites, or that one site in particular provides a very low conversion rate. Knowing the conversion rate of your site in general and of each of its traffic sources will allow you to focus and tweak your advertising efforts to maximize the results while minimizing the effort and expense.
Assign and Calculate Revenue
Every action and interaction on your website can be assigned a value. Of course, a sale will have a higher value than a click-through, but each interaction has a value. Analytics are helpful in determining and assigning a value to these actions. When you know what is working on your site and what is not, you are then able to prioritize decisions and increase your site’s profitability.
Knowing your analytics makes the decision making process easier and faster for you. Google Analytics can provide you with all the information you need to make these decisions and Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is a WordPress plugin that brings all the Google Analytics information directly into your WordPress dashboard.
Analytics can be a full-time job and can take a dedicated professional to comb through all the data and make sense of it all. But if you know where to look and what to look for, you can manage this information on your own and make educated decisions on your marketing efforts.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
There are always huge changes in digital marketing. 2016 had no shortages of changes. Sometimes, those changes come in the form of redefining how, what, when, where, and why. And, the future of conversion rate optimization is becoming more defined as time goes on.
“The old ways of doing things just won’t get you very far anymore.” It’s, in fact, not enough.
Landing Page Optimization As We Know It Is Not Enough
The term ‘landing page optimization’ was first penned by Tim Ash in his book, ‘Landing Page Optimization’. Although the term is a little misleading by today’s standards, the newer term, ‘conversion rate optimization’ is closer to being accurate, but still falls a little short. In other words, optimization goes beyond just inflating the conversion rate.
These two terms seem to imply that one should seek to optimize campaign-oriented landing pages only. That is simply not the case. Anywhere significant amounts of traffic enter a website should be optimized — not just for search, but for usability and conversions. This could mean the complete revamping of an entire website in some cases. Imagine a site optimized with a compelling end-to-end online experience with a user-centered whole-site redesign. That’s what you want because it’s what your users want!
Surface Knowledge Is Not Enough Either
It’s necessary to dedicate some time each week to learning. Few people dedicate time for themselves each week to digging deeper into a subject and truly learn the ins and outs. Most are happy with reading a blog post or a top ten list online.
It can be difficult to set that time aside each week amid the vast number of items on our to-do list or from all of the distractions around us, such as email. But it is necessary to set some time aside to pick up a book and dig deep into learning. If possible, attend a workshop or a conference or cultivate a like-minded group of people with which to socialize.
Landing Page Testing Is Also Not Enough
Landing page testing is a critical part of CRO (conversion rate optimization), but it is not all there is to it. It’s possible to get too focused on just testing every aspect of a landing page and to get lost in the process. Testing for the sake of testing can take you down the wrong road and soon you will become lost in a sea of split tests that are doing little to improve your conversions.
Time needs to be spent to understand the psychology of your visitors, their beliefs, and performing user research. Exit surveys and interviewing customers are important methods of gathering data. Take the data gathered from your customers, implement those findings into your website and then testing those changes will bring more valid results.
Static Content Is Not Enough, No Matter What You’ve Read
Most content that is written for a site has a generic visitor in mind. This content is generally bland and written to try not to offend anyone. There is no one kind of visitor. Each visitor is unique and has their own set of needs and wants.
The closer you can come to creating content that meets the specific wants and needs of a visitor, the better your conversion rates will become.
In order to create content geared more closely towards the type of visitors on your site, it will help to know more about the visitors themselves. This may include such analytics information as to the history of their past visits; what other content they consumed while on the site; what are their demographics; are they viewing videos on the site; and any other kind of information that you can gather.
It is then possible to take this information and create content that is more specific for those visitors. If this sounds like a lot of work, it is. But it will be worth it. Doing the same thing in 2017 that you have been doing in the past is not enough. It’s especially not enough if you plan to stay competitive.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
Targeting the right keywords is a fundamental part of your SEO efforts. Growing your keyword list should be a focus in your SEO. Knowing which keywords your competition is ranking for and how they are using those keywords is a great place to start with your own efforts. Fortunately, there are tools that will allow you to spy on what keywords your competitors are currently using and which keywords have worked well in the past.
SEMrush
SEMrush has a keyword tool that will allow you to spy on your competition and discover not only what keywords they are ranking for organically, but what keywords they are targeting through paid advertising as well. Since the keywords for organic search do not perform the same as keywords targeted for advertising, this is valuable information.
SEMrush gives detailed analytic information on all keywords returned in its search. There are three monthly subscription rates: Pro ($69.95), Guru ($149.95), and Business ($549.95).
SpyFu
Not only is SpyFu able to return all the keywords your competition currently ranks for and the keywords they are currently targeting in paid advertising, but they return every organic rank and ad variation for the past nine years.
Knowing what keywords your competition is currently using is very helpful, but knowing which keywords they have ranked for and targeted over the past nine years is extremely beneficial.
SpyFu offers in-depth SEO reports for your keywords as well. There are three monthly subscription rates: Basic ($79), Professional ($139), and Agency ($999).
KeywordSpy
Similar to the other two keyword tools, KeywordSpy returns a report and analysis of your competitor’s keywords and how they are ranking. But the depth of detail KeywordSpy returns is greater than the other two keyword tools.
KeywordSpy also gives useful details for pay-per-click campaigns, such as the per click cost for each keyword, how many clicks you could expect, the daily cost and other detailed statistics.
KeywordSpy has four monthly subscription rates: Research ($89.95), Tracking ($89.95), Professional ($139.95), and Agency & Enterprise ($995 and up).
Keyword research is a vital and on-going part of any SEO strategy and having the right tools in place makes any job a little easier. These three keyword tools, while subscription based, can save you even more in the time, effort, and expense of targeting the wrong keywords or underperforming keywords. These are tools that should be in your SEO tool belt.
We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.
