How Bad Web Design Can Affect Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
When you create a marketing strategy, you want to make sure that your marketing dollars are going to good use. While you put a lot of thought into developing a strategy that works to grow your business while staying within budget, there are some things that could be detracting from your marketing efforts without you even realizing it. A poorly-designed website is one of the top things that could be negatively affecting your growth. Learn more about how bad website design can impact your marketing, how to spot it, and what you can do to prevent it.
Why Is Web Design Important?
Often, your website is the first experience that people have with your brand, so it’s your opportunity to make a positive impression. You have only a few seconds to grab their attention before they decide to either explore your site more (and potentially make a purchase or take another desired action) or leave. This means that your site needs to be attractive, easy to navigate, and simple to understand. Good web design keeps leads on your website, while bad web design may cause them to leave.
A beautiful, functional, modern-looking website will also help boost your credibility and trustworthiness as a business. A customer is more likely to trust and do business with a company that has a professional website loaded with helpful content. On the other hand, if your biggest competitors have better websites, you can say goodbye to potential customers and the revenue they bring with them. But the good news is that it isn’t too difficult to create a great website, as long as you know what to look for. Next, we’ll discuss some aspects of web design that can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts, and ultimately, your bottom line.
SEO and User Experience
Many aspects of web design influence how the content on your site looks and functions, which, in turn, affects how search engines rank your pages on search engine results pages (SERPs). You can easily optimize the design and function of your site using SEO techniques. On-page SEO strategies include optimizing title tags, page content, internal links, and page URLs. If you don’t pay attention to your on-page SEO, you will be fighting hard to appear at the top of SERPs, which means that you won’t be reaching as wide an audience as you could.
Google ranks pages based on certain algorithms that help them determine how helpful and relevant your pages are to a user’s search query. And while the content on your pages is important to SEO, user experience is becoming a more essential aspect of SEO. Google’s upcoming Page Experience algorithm updates are set to roll out in the spring of 2021, and a lot of these changes are focused on user experience. Pages that are mobile-friendly, secure, and quick-loading will rank higher on SERPs.
And finally, great web design and solid SEO practices make your website more accessible. Shouldn’t everyone, no matter their ability, be able to browse the internet easily? An SEO-friendly, accessible website will provide captions on videos for those who are hard of hearing, alt tags on images and clear text for those who are visually-impaired, and keyboard navigation for people unable to use a mouse. Always stick to web accessibility standards for the best results.
Is Your Content Up To Par?
One of the most essential parts of your overall web design and marketing strategy should be content marketing, and great content definitely keeps people on your site. The main reason a visitor lands on your site is to find information. This is why it’s so important to design your website and all of your content based on user intent. Do you know what your audience wants and needs? Why will they be coming to your site in the first place? If you have a good idea of what they’re looking for, you can cater the contents of your site directly to their needs. When it’s easy for them to find what they are looking for, leads will stick around and are more likely to convert.
One of the key concepts of inbound marketing is creating a library of informative content that attracts, engages, and delights leads from the first moment they interact with your brand. But even if your content is informative, it needs to have a few other elements to make it effective. First, focus on making it easy to read and easy to understand. Informative content doesn’t have to be loaded with technical jargon. Sentences should be short, concise, and to the point. And be sure to end your content with a clear call to action that tells visitors what to do next. When you make the next steps easy to take, people are more likely to take them.
What’s Your PPC Quality Score?
Your PPC advertisements can make up a big part of your digital marketing strategy, but did you know that your web design could impact your PPC campaign’s quality score? Your quality score is based on how relevant ads are to the keywords you’re using but is also based on the landing pages that people are taken to once they click your ad. Well-designed landing pages have clear headlines, an easy-to-follow layout, and an applicable call to action. Google will rank ads with a better quality score higher, and your quality score will also affect your cost per click. Higher quality ads will be more cost-effective, so it’s important to design your landing pages well.
What To Do About Bad Web Design?
If your website isn’t performing as well as you’d like, it could be a result of bad web design. Marketing and web design are tightly connected, so a beautifully designed site will attract leads and help you grow your revenue. If your site hasn’t been redesigned in a few years and you feel like you’re missing out on the latest web design trends, get in touch with us! Our custom website design services will bring your website up to speed and help your business reach its goals.
