Design Itself Does Not Sell Your Website

Design Itself Does Not Sell Your Website

You just launched your website, and you’re super excited and ready for the traffic and the sells to come! It’s been a couple weeks, and nothing? You’re not understanding, your site is up, you told people to go to it, the design is the best you’ve ever seen and still you’re not getting the traffic you thought you would get. Just because you have a website and it looks nice, that design itself is not going to win over your audience.

Wait, you telling me I just spent all this time designing my site and wasted my money on a newer nice-looking template, for nothing?

No that’s not what I’m telling you, in order to deliver the best user experience possible to your customers you need more than just your design, you need to first understand what they want and are looking for, and build a solid foundation of content, usable navigation, good design, and strong SEO practices.

Let’s dive right on in and discuss some strategies to build upon that beautiful web design you have.

Content

I know you’ve probably heard this one before, “Content is King” No matter how many times you’ve heard it, it’s true. You can have the best-looking website, designed well, does what you want and need it to do, but if it’s lacking content, something that will keep your customers coming back and interested, then all of the pretty designs mean nothing.

One of the compliments I get so much about my website is, I really enjoyed reading your articles, I learned what I needed, or thanks for the free branding checklist, it really helped me think more in detail about my brand. Providing value is what I like to call it. I know what my customers are looking for and what problems they are having so by creating engaging content that solves their problems is not only helping them, it’s helping me as well. It allows me to attract not just my current customers, but potential new customers as well.

Before your web design is started, think about the type of content you want on your website, and be sure that content is in line with what your business does, or the services you provide. This will take some time but if done right, and written with targeted keywords, your audience, and search engines will love your site.

User Experience

There is nothing more frustrating than going to a website and not being able to find what you’re looking for, or perhaps you look at a webpage on your laptop and fall in love with it but once you access it from your phone, images and texts are all out of place.

Has this ever happened to you?

If so then that is you having a user experience.  A well thought out web strategy will prevent this from happening to your customers when they interact with your website.

User Experience is the overall experience and feeling of a person using a product such as a website or computer application. Planning out this experience is a must and it great to work with a UX designer that understands how users interact with websites and who is experienced.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization better known as “SEO” is next up on our web strategy list, and is an important one. Why is it so important though? If you have a website online, how will your customers find you? Where do they look? SEO goes hand in hand with content. If you have well written content, then you’re already on the right path.

The majority of web traffic is driven by the major commercial search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo and they are the primary method of navigation for most people that use the internet. If search engines cannot find your site, or add your content to their databases, you miss out on incredible opportunities to drive traffic to your site.

Here are a few things to think about when coming up with your SEO strategy

• Use keywords in your content that your audience are searching for
• Use the proper heading hierarchy
• Ensure your page titles use keywords that are associated with your content
• Write descriptive meta tags

Marketing/Promotion

You’ve written great content, have a well thought out UX design, and have optimized your website with meaningful keywords, now it’s time to promote. A closed mouth doesn’t get fed, if you’re not telling people about your website, your products and your services, then all of this hard work has just gone down the drain.

Sure, you’ll get some organic web traffic from web searches but to really take advantage of all of your hard work, set up the necessary social media profiles and put together a social media strategy.

So many businesses set up Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and don’t a well-defined social media strategy. They set up and just post hoping to get likes, followers, and shares.

Here are some key points to take into consideration before launching and promoting on your social media platforms

• Set goals that align with your marketing efforts
• Set up a tracking/metrics system to measure your progress
• Know your audience engage & listen
• Evaluate what you’ve accomplished thus far
• Repeat

As you can see, it takes more than just a great design to sell products or services from your website. Before you launch your website, look back on all these steps and ensure your content is up to par, your customers can navigate your site without getting frustrated, your pages optimized for search engines, and you have a well-defined social media strategy to get the word out.