A digital marketing strategy includes email marketing, content marketing, paid ads, social media marketing, and many more. A lot of factors affect digital marketing in ways that are unimaginable to new marketers. One of which is web design.
Almost every new marketer fails to acknowledge the benefits they can extract from having a well-designed website. It is extremely beneficial, especially when focusing on the local market.
In this article, we’d discuss how crucial web designing is in a digital marketing strategy.
Importance of Web Design in Digital Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
New websites often consider SEO as duct tape that can be plastered to patch the issues like low traffic and failing to rank for keywords. But that often is not the case. The SEO fundamentals need to be hard-coded into the website even before the first digital marketing strategy fabricates.
We won’t be discussing website content as a web design element here, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it while designing the website. Let’s discuss attributes that you should consider while designing your website to stay ahead.
If unsure, you could try getting help from local service providers. Say if you are around Wisconsin, try contacting a Milwaukee SEO service.
- Domain Name
A general misconception about domain names is that you need to have your keyword in there. But if that be the case, high DR websites like Wikipedia or Hubspot would never have ranked in the first place. Your domain name should make sense and relate to the business or message that you are trying to convey.
A keyword-specific domain name might work for local businesses with domain names ending with .in, .eu, etc., but it does little for overall SEO. When search engines are crawling through your website, they give little to no weightage to the domain name and most heavily rely on the other elements like link structure, content quality, and relevancy.
This is why a digital marketing agency in Milwaukee suggests that you should not decide on a domain name immediately. You must think about it well since it would carry the overall brand and image you built. Thus, it’s advisable that you contact the digital marketing agency Milwaukee to build a strategy up.
When working with subdomains, backlink the content of the sub-domain to the primary domain to enhance the SEO capabilities of the website.
- Hosting
A slow website is a dead website. In this era of faster internet and blazing fast downloads, having a slow website that takes more than a few seconds to load is suicide. A good hosting provider is critical for web designing and digital marketing in Milwaukee because of the SEO benefits it offers.
- Less Downtime
The downtime of your website is the span of time the website was inaccessible. While every website may incur this issue once in a while, having a huge downtime often leads to your audience bouncing back and the search engines punishing you. Check the reviews and promises your hosting provider has and decide upon the best one wisely.
- Faster Loading Speed
A slow-loading website is more destructive than having frequent downtimes. Downtimes may lose you some traffic, but a slow-loading website will leave you absolutely dry.
Even if your content were top-notch, your audience would never want to visit your site because of the load time. No one likes to wait forever when it’s not expected. Consider waterfall project management phases to design and implement your website or web application.
- Better Server Location
The physical distance between a requesting connection and the server leaves a huge impact on the loading time of the website. The requests often get lost in between if the servers are too distant from the connection.
Decide upon your audience and which demographic they are in and if it’s not possible to lease servers on the locations themselves, try using proxy servers for a faster loading time.
- Search Engine Crawling
Search engines like Google crawl your websites to index your pages. Although images and videos do get indexed in some cases, the most important web design element in your arsenal is text-based content.
Let’s say, for example, one searches for “Milwaukee web design agency”. The search engines need to understand what you are offering and who to direct to your website.
Another example can include Youtube. Although the website is full of video-based content. The crawlers understand the content through the title, description, subtitles, and the keywords mentioned.
- Link Structure
Consider tools like XML sitemaps to help search engines crawl your website beyond the homepage. An easily navigable website with a clearly defined link structure helps the spiders crawl through it efficiently. As you may have trouble finding your way through uncharted roads without clear instructions, the crawlers may also lose their way if your website isn’t navigable.
Try to keep your URLs simple. Clearly define what a particular URL does and refrain from using automatically generated URLs on your website.
www.abcxyz.com/about
www.xyzabc.com/contact are examples of URLs that help both the crawlers and the users. But,
www.abcxyz.com/pq43
www.xyzabc.com/ct543 aren’t.
- Customer Confidence
Your audience and customers expect your website to have the latest functionalities that your competitors offer. Although it vastly depends on the niche you are in, it’s true in a general sense. Suppose you are a business that specializes in cybersecurity, if your website still is vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, your customers won’t be taking your services.
If your website is old and bulky, the bounce rate automatically increases. And take our word for it, search engines do not like a higher bounce rate. Modernizing your website design is absolutely necessary to materialize your digital marketing strategy.
Lots of content management systems (CMS) offer simple templates that you can build your website on. While these are updated templates, they are boring and pretty general. Search engines do not punish your digital marketing strategy for being outdated, they punish you for a higher bounce rate. If you already have a functional website that is attracting enough traffic, that’s fine. But if you aren’t, revamping the website is the way to go.
- User Engagement
Your digital marketing strategies are bound to fail if the customers aren’t engaged on the landing page. Any marketing strategy revolves around keeping your audience to the website as much as possible and making them consume your content to have a sale.
For instance, you want to engage with the market in the Wisconsin area. Then, you can perform surveys, gather data, or check a Milwaukee digital agency to know what the locals want and need. You can then apply it to your site to keep them engaged.
If your website isn’t engaging enough, or the links are blind, the marketing strategies that you’d employ might be able to bring the prospects to your website but would fail to seal the deal. Consider reflecting on your brand’s vision, message, and services through the website. Employing strategic plans such as user testing and A/B testing may also be viable.
- Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization directly affects digital marketing strategies and SEO techniques. Since the number of mobile users is increasing, the search engines reward mobile-optimized sites more than the ones that aren’t. As SEO is a part of your digital marketing strategy, mobile optimization is a must.
The Bottom Line
Hopefully, this article has enlightened you about the effects of web design on digital marketing strategies. The fundamental attributes are SEO, mobile optimization, user engagement, and customer confidence. Try revamping the website by following the points mentioned above and you’d see an influx of traffic in no time.