WEBSITE REDESIGN OR WEBSITE REFRESH TO IMPROVE CONVERSION RATES
WEBSITE REDESIGN or WEBSITE REFRESH?
When planning a website redesign or website refresh, keep in mind a poorly designed website can drastically reduce your conversion rates and sales
Improving your site design is often a much easier way to increase your
digital marketing strategy. So let’s talk website redesign or website refresh advice.
The most important consideration in a website redesign should be retaining existing customers while also drawing new prospects into the fold. There are four key aspects of design that will affect an individual’s decision whether or not they want to purchase from you: usability, aesthetics, usefulness/features offered by company (product), credibility of brand name – as well as information about products on offer at different price points. A good designer can help ensure these elements work together and improve the ROI of your marketing budget.
Website Redesign or Refresh?
We tend to overcomplicate the concept of user experience. In the end, the difference between outstanding user experience and junk comes down to a few simple concepts.
First, a great design will allow a visitor to easily find the information they need. The user experience is made up of three main pieces, look, feel, and functionality.
Secondly, a website redesign will give your website a boost in SEO value, reduce bounce rates (leading to more conversions) and improve the user experience.
Lastly, a redesign is more than a refresh. A website re-design is a wonderful thing if your old site needs an update, especially if it lives in a time capsule, needing SEO improvements and has old content that hasn’t been updated. Every thing points back to why you want or need a website for your business.
Start by Answering These Questions about your website redesign
With our clients, when we are hired to help with a new website or a redesign, we ask the brand we are doing the new website for a series of questions. This allows us to start our research and development of the new redesign or project.
- Who is your target audience?
- Why do they come to your website?
- What is your ultimate goal with your website?
- Currently, what are your most valuable pages or content?
- Which parts of your website have the most traffic?
- have you received any complaints about your website?
Once we have the questions answered, our team then starts looking at a website, checks out the visuals, content, search rankings and links to see if they’re broken. We check page loading speed and start to develop a strategy to meet all the must haves for the project.
Basic Functionality
If you are just after a refresh of your website, adding new fonts, colors and graphics are exciting and quick to turn around, but first you need to make sure your website is functional.
Take a little time and start to study your analytics, user flow around the site navigation and content. Find your website’s hotspots. Both will give insights on how to build a better look and feel for your website while showing if you need any functionality improvements.
Of course 99% of the visitors to your website hit the home page first. It is the main source of messaging, branding and the navigation for your website. In our years fo experience, this is were we find the first set of problems to find solutions to. The most common mistake on a home page is that it is cluttered and tries to say everything about the brand in one place. This can be overwhelming and covers so many areas that a new visitor to your website can get flustered and never click on anything, just leaving with out ever going deeper in to your offerings. Keep the content clean and concise, but make sure to include your CTA’s (Call to actions).
The goal is to have the visitor take action and convert, so make it easy for them. Place a button with text on it that says something like ‘sign up now’ or ‘learn more’. These are good words that entice visitors who may be in need of what you offer. Make sure they’re close enough to where someone can easily find them and click on one without having to search for it.
include seo in your website redesign or refresh
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important part of the website redesign. Making a website SEO friendly allows the search engine to crawl each page, interpret it, and then index it into their database. Once a site has been indexed, it can give visitors your page when they search for specific topics.
The number of people coming to your website will grow exponentially when it is SEO friendly. This means that you’ll have more sales as a result and conversions will increase because the traffic increases. Having an optimized site also allows for better ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or other search engine rankings so that visitors can find what they’re searching for.
the better your content is on each page, the more likely your site will rank on the first page of google and other search engines.
Start with keyword research and find the keywords that your target audience is entering into the search engines (Google) to get information. Once you have a list of keywords, use them appropriately throughout your pages content. Keep in mind that the keywords need to make sense within the text, stuffing is not going to get you better ratings.
One of the easiest tips we share with new SEO clients is to use title tags, header tags, alt image text, and meta descriptions on every page.
SPEED COUNTS
Website page speed is vital for success on the web. Visitors who are left waiting can easily get frustrated and move to another website. Load speeds also affect your ranking on Google. Visitors will bounce (leave) a slow website, bringing your bounce rate up and your search engine rankings down. There are a few ways to improve how fast a page loads. Start to optimize images, get rid of needless plugins, and permit browser caching.
Mobile Friendly Websites (Responsive Websites)
When doing a website refresh or redesign, keep in mind that these days more and more people are looking at sites on mobile devices. When designing a site, you want to create a responsive design or a mobile-friendly version of the site. The mobile design needs to be cleaner and less cluttered than the desktop version. You will need to minimize page elements and scale down some of the assets.
Website Work is Never Really Done
Once the new website goes live, many brands think the work is done. However, customer’s preferences change, browser technologies improve, and SEO changes. Website work is never really done, there is always the need to check in on how the website is working and what needs to be adjusted.
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If you are still unsure about how to improve your website or need a professional team to audit your site, the Marketography Team is ready to help. Contact us today on digital marketing strategies to beat your competition.