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How Web Design Helps Business?

If you’re losing traffic to the competition, it might be time to update your website. Here is how better web design means better business.

A bespoke website perfectly encapsulates your ethos, products, and corporate persona. A good web design showcases the best parts of your brand, highlighting them to consumers. Investing in a new web design which is tailored to your needs allows for an increased web reach and better rankings with Search Engine Results Pages.

Web Design and Your Business

Think of your website as your virtual storefront and you may begin to see why web design is important. Just like the window dressers of old, web designers are skilled in using your pages to highlight the best products and services that your business offers. They use it like a virtual window, to give new leads (potential customers) an insight into what to expect when they buy from you. However, there’s much more to successful, top quality web design than just making things look pretty.

The Difference Between a Good Web Design and a Bad Web Design

To further understand how web design helps build your business, it’s easier to look at what a bad design does. If you have a bad website, you will miss opportunities for internal link building, something which helps you rank higher in SERPS. You might not be driving people to your shop, but away from it. You could fail to mention your address or local areas, resulting in a loss of local custom. Your website might not be operating to its full potential by failing to provide you with a sales funnel.

You see, web design is all about User Experience (UX.) When we have a bad user experience, we have a problem. If your site takes too long to load, if clients can’t search it, or if it doesn’t have the information they need, they simply won’t use it. The average user waits no more than two seconds for a page to load before they choose another site. So a bad website could be doing your business more harm than good.

Using Colchester Web Designers to Help Your Business

When you get the web design correct, though, you can expect far more traffic, better user experiences, and heightened reach for your business. The benefits of a correctly established web design start with an intuitive website that is responsive to consumer needs and ends with massive growth in ROI. Investing in your website as your one key tool from the outset allows you to reach more clients and sell more product. It really is as simple as that.

Where to Find First Class Web Design for Colchester Businesses

If your business needs to re-examine its web design or even if you need an entirely new website, our Colchester web design company is here to help. We have years of experience in producing excellent websites which score highly in SERPs and increase our client’s marketing funnels. If you would like web design in Essexsimply visit our pages to secure the help of one of the leading SEO and web design companies in Colchester, Chelmsford, Clacton, Basildon, and beyond.

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Be Visible and Helpful for Your Customers

Showing your customers that you’re readily available for orders, questions or concerns is more important now than it has ever been.

In times of uncertainty, we are all craving certainty wherever we can get it from, and that should least of all be with businesses that we purchase from.

Here are some tips on how you can make your customers feel fully comfortable and at ease when they decide to buy products from your website.

You Must Be Convenient

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Or, it must simply be an easy user experience for people to navigate your website and make purchases.

Delivery and collection options should be made clear, and the payment process should be simple.

Provide Website Security

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Ensure that your website has a valid SSL certificate to confirm that your website has a secure connection for your customers. More and more customers are aware of, and actively looking for, websites that use HTTPS.

The padlock icon will show them that not only is their time on your website safe, but that you care about their security and confidentiality when they engage with your business.

When Customers Search, Be There

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There are many ways in which you can do this, but we recommend using keywords strategically, and within a character limit, that your customers are actively searching for within the Meta Data of your core pages, product categories, and product pages themselves to help your customers find you to get what they need.

This is one of many SEO techniques available to help your business become more visible online.

We also recommend having an active social media account, primarily Facebook, with frequent posts about products, how you’re looking to help customers (discounts and special offers), and making it clear that you’re available for support and help with any questions.

We also covered the benefits of Facebook Messenger for your business in this recent article.

Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

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Where possible, add a “Meet The Team” page on your website with photos of members of your team (preferably smiley, happy faces to convey friendliness).

Then, add information on each member’s name, their role at the company, and how they each help the customer.

Maybe even add a silly fact or hobby for each staff member just to make things a bit more fun.

Social Proof Your Business

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Wherever you have good reviews, be it on Facebook, TripAdvisor, TrustPilot or Google, display them proudly on your website. You can also create graphics with your ratings to post both on your website and social media as well.

Positive reviews show customers that they can trust your business, your quality of products, and your customer service. Make no mistake, review ratings can be a defining factor when it comes to choosing one business over another.

You can also offer the chance for customers to review with a follow-up email to confirmed purchasers. You can also post instructions and incentives on social media to help people leave you impartial reviews.

Finally, Offer Only THE BEST Customer Service

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This is perhaps the most important on the list, and it costs absolutely nothing except patience, perseverance and kindness.

Make sure you offer an impeccable level of customer service to anyone who gets in touch with you. Attributes that can improve your customer service include:

  • Friendly tone of voice
  • Polite manners
  • Understanding approach
  • Positive and helpful attitude

Try to incorporate these traits when speaking to customers, whether they have a question, a compliment or a complaint. Offer email correspondence, the opportunity for a phone call, or even a Skype or FaceTime call if appropriate.

Remain easy to contact wherever possible and especially during your business’ working hours.

If you have an influx of emails on your website, or a full inbox of messages on social media, make sure that you, or your colleague assigned to customer service tasks, is highly responsive and is able to reply to enquiries as soon as possible. This will help give your customers the service that they deserve.

Speaking of customer service, if there’s anything we can support you with today, or if you have any questions about this article – or anything else for that matter – we’re just a phone call away, Please give us a call on 01255 446 117 and we’ll be happy to help.

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Protect Your Business and Revenue Stream

We always aim not to just keep our clients’ businesses afloat, but to help them thrive within their industry. If done right, your website will see you enjoy the kind of success that makes you cherish the day you decided to take your business online.

There’s a number of ways you can enjoy digital success, even when times are tough. Take a look at our tips below:

Be Wowed by Woocommerce

WooCommerce is a fantastic WordPress plugin that allows you to integrate your products and product categories with an online payment system. In turn, this essentially allows you to sell your products to your customers online.

It also allows you to keep track of your orders, how much each order value is, total order values per set dates, and keep track of each customer’s name and address. These features permit you to use WooCommerce as your ultimate Ecommerce hub when setting up, analysing and enjoying your website’s commercial capacity.

Analyse Your Website’s Performance

Google Analytics is a brilliant free tool you can use to evaluate your website’s performance data. 

This can include the amount of traffic you receive, total returning users, percentage of customers leaving your website quickly (if high, then you know there’s an issue), amount of pages visited and much more.

You can also filter this data per page on your website and in comparison to previous dates to assess performance critically.

Keep Up With Your Keywords

Make sure to keep an eye on the keywords that you consider core to your business, and make sure they’re keywords that people are actively searching for and are simultaneously relevant to your business offerings.

There are also tools available, such as SEMrush and AHREFS, that allow you to track your competitors search engine rankings alongside your own to compare your performance against there’s.

When times are tough, they’ll be the times to utilise SEO activity more than ever.

So if you see your competitor’s rankings drop, don’t resign yourself to a similar path, work harder than ever to ensure that your keyword rankings not only do not suffer the same fate, but instead climb the rankings by spending more hours conducting SEO to use your competitor’s decreases in rankings to your own website’s advantage.

Ramp Up The Heat with Hotjar

To improve your site’s conversion rate, we recommended a tool called Hotjar to add invisible heatmaps on your website to determine which areas of the site people are interacting with most and which they are not (hot and cold areas).

Hotjar also anonymously records users’ individually experiencing your site (no personal details like names are revealed) to show you which parts of your site encourage people to convert, and which parts are lacking and lead to people leaving the site.

This data allows you to make informed changes to your website in order to help customers find what they want from your site, and for you to help them find what you want to offer them.

For example, you can make brochure downloads more visible and accessible, you can make contact options easier and better signposted — you can even change button colours and make them stand out more.

Keep Calm, and Carry on Clicking

If you want to know how many people are clicking on certain elements of your website, e.g. the “submit” button of your contact form, or how many people are clicking your email address or phone number, then you can use a tool called Google Tag Manager.

This allows you to set up variables, triggers and tags that allow you to track the clicks you deem to be most valuable on your site. It also allows you to track page time, average scroll depth and a number of other metrics.You can then integrate Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics and compare your clicks weekly, Month-on-Month or Year-on-Year to establish if your website is generating more valuable clicks as a result of your design and marketing activity.

Keep Optimising Your Site

Another great Google tool we use is called Google Optimize (note the American spelling). It allows you to test changes you’ve considered making (following your data analysis from Hotjar and Google Analytics) without permanently changing your website, and potentially making it worse.

Google Optimize allows you to test two or more variations of a page on your website, the original, and a variation that you can either make live changes to via Optimize, or a variation that you can create on WordPress to have 50% of your audience see instead of the original page.

You can tailor multiple facets of your tests on Optimize, such as how much of your audience is split percentage-wise, whether you change a small or large amount of aspects on your variation, and what kind of performance metrics you use to see a statistically significant result.

We like to use bounce rates, page views, and conversions (e.g. getting in contact or purchasing a product) as metrics to help us determine which page has performed better.

We recommend testing for at least two months and monitoring results along the way before ending your experiment.

Once you have significant results data, in relation to the metrics that you chose, you can decide whether to keep your original page, or use the variation as the new page design. If the results aren’t clear cut, you can end the test and start a new one with different, perhaps more radical changes made to your website.

Try not to test too many changes at once, at least for the first time as well. Try to test one or two changes and then build from there, otherwise you won’t be sure which change had the significant impact you were looking for.

We’re Always Here to Help

With all honesty and sincerity, we’ve seen clients achieve results beyond their highest expectations by using a few of these tips within our website design and marketing packages.

If you need assistance with any of these tips, please ask your website administrator to assist you, or give us a call on 01255 446117 and we’ll be happy to offer our support.

We love seeing people’s online ventures start from nothing and turn into something that both ourselves and clients can be proud of. We enjoy nothing more than paying back the faith people put into us by achieving outstanding results for their business online.