This is the final part in our four-part series on effective web design. If you haven’t done so already, get the most out of your website by completing our other three guides: the basics, intermediate, and advanced.
Now that you’re ready, what’s in our definitive guide? The simple answer is maintenance. Your industry, customers, and technology are constantly changing year over year. And if you treat your website as a one-time investment, you’ll misalign with these three areas.
That’s why it’s important to make data-driven design choices, prioritize organic traffic, leverage paid media, and focus on deeper web design. Take a closer look at what that truly means below.
Base Your Web Design Decisions on Data
The hallmark of great web design is providing the best customer experience. The tried-and-true way to do this is to base your web design decisions on qualitative and quantitative data. That means taking the following agile approach:
- Start by collecting feedback from your customers (quantitative and qualitative)
- Benchmark that feedback against your key performance indicators
- Analyze your data and pull insights from your data
- Create and execute action items
- Monitor the results to see whether your changes improved your site.
- Repeat
This agile approach drives continuous improvements to your website and ensures your customers receive the best digital experience.
Focus on Organic Traffic
At this stage, your goal is to continue capturing visitors who search for specific keywords through content marketing. You’ll just need to do more of it. With an SEO expert, you can get content planning and strategy support around keywords to target and keywords to skip. Keep the following in mind around content:
- Don’t skip the basics of SEO, including technical, on-page, and off-page optimizations. Otherwise, your content may not be found in search results.
- Content marketing for SEO is an ongoing process. That’s because your customers and their preferences are evolving, so content optimization is critical to meeting their digital expectations.
Leverage Paid Media
Paid media is a tool that helps with lead generation and does two things well:
- It keeps your sales funnel full for future business.
- It can target higher-quality leads who are further down your sales funnel.
Whether you’re waiting on organic traffic from your content marketing or supplementing your website with additional lead generation opportunities, paid media should be in your marketing mix. The question is, how much budget should you set aside? That’s a question that a paid media specialist can help you with!
Dive Deeper into Website Performance
Most businesses use a CMS, and if you do, perhaps you’ve optimized everything, including using the bare minimum plugins, custom code, and third-party services, and yet your website is clunky. According to Google, a site that increases loading time from 1 to 3 seconds experiences a 32% increase in bounce rate (the rate at which someone leaves your site without taking any action). That’s some serious loss of traffic, given all the hard work that you’ve done.
If you’re experiencing slow page load times with no resolution and want to improve web traffic, consider working with an SEO agency.
The Bottom Line
Effective web design doesn’t stop after launching your website. By continuously maintaining your site with data-backed decisions, a strong organic and paid traffic strategy, and a relentless focus on performance, your website stays aligned with your customers, your industry, and the technology expectations.
Connect with our team today to get started on building your definitive website!
