WEB DESIGN and SEO

Your business website is an extremely useful tool to getting you found online.  Your need to put alot thought into your website, its content, or how your customers can find you. Simply spending a week getting your website right, can mean the difference between turning away ready-to-buy customers because you're getting too many enquiries a day, and your sales team actively running around wasting time trying to find business from unqualified leads.

WEB DESIGN

Plan your structure and content!

I could go on about good and bad Web design for hours. In fact, I have, on my Insights page. However, truth is, there are hundreds of opposing theories and trends, and few designers agree on the dos and don'ts. 

The most important thing to consider when designing a web page, is your target audience. Who are they and how do they interact with your business? The structure of your site needs to reflect this.

Will you use your website to actually sell products? You'll need an online store with ecommerce functionality. Will your website be used to provide information? What sort of information, and how will you answer it? Videos? FAQ? Blog posts? ​Or like many businesses, you're not quite sure exactly what your website is for, you just know you need a web presence in today's technology driven world. 

Take a look at your current business website; most were created for the sole purpose to have a web presence. While functioning and complete, there is often room for improvement to better follow 2017 design trends and reach your target market with SEO.

 When designing your website, the key things to consider are:
  • Your target audience. What do they expect in a website? How will you give this to them?
  • What key messages do you want to send? If they only stay on your site for 30seconds, what's the one take-away they need to absorb?
  • What story or progression should they follow? When they're looking at your home page, where do you want them to click? Is there a clear "call to action" for them to naturally take the next step into the story your telling?  Viewers want to be lead, the first click should be an obvious one. When most businesses hear "call-to action" they immediate think of the "Call now!" or "Buy Now" button. However, when someone lands on your website, they don't know enough about you to want to "buy now" as their first step. Give them a call to action which lets them find out more about you and your product or service, but in the sense that benefits them. They won't click on "hear about our services" because they dont care about what you can do. They care about what they can get from you. make your call to action "Save money today!", "Discover a faster way to work" or "Save the world while looking fabulous".  Provide an action they want to take. 
  • Then give them exactly what they expect. Most importantly with these specific calls to action, is having an appropriate page to link to that answers exactly what you've said. If they click and the page is a genetic "services" page or doesn't give them exactly what they expect, they won't stay very long. If they click on "Save the world while looking fabulous", they should find a page with that as a title, that details your beauty products and the good they're doing in the world. Create these specific landing pages!
  • The actual look and layout of your website is secondary in the design process after determining the structure, landing pages and heirarchy of pages. What works for each unique business is variable and subjective. 
If you'd like some assistance in designing your website

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

Get found online!

When people need what your business has to offer, how do they find you? Over 85% of consumers surveyed, find businesses they need by searching online. So how do you make sure when they type a question into Google, you're website comes up on the  first page? SEO ! Optimising your website to better appeal to the search engine's algorithms!

Now despite what many "Guaranteed 1st page" SEO companies say, there is no exact science to SEO. The Algorithms Google (and Bing and Yahoo) uses are constantly changing and adapting. But their purpose - to give searchers what they're looking for - remains. Appearing on Google's first page won't happen overnight, but the easiest way to move up the results is to provide quality, up to date, valuable information your customers wants to know.

Here are some ways to improve your SEO :
  • Update your content often. Google isn't likely to rank a website that hasn't been changed a year.
  • Word your website content to include keywords and terms and questions people are searching for. If your website mentions "Quality coffee in Brisbane" several times throughout the paragraphs, you're more likely to appear when people search those terms. Be careful that you don't hide key words or cheat. Google knows. 
  • Use your headings wisely. You should have different levels of headings, which means Heading 1 is the most important, overview of what they'll find. Keywords within your subheadings of Headings 2 and 3 will still be ranked highly to search engines. Bold and emphasized text is also scanned for key words before the body of your text. The algorithms are designed to determine if your block of text is relevant to the search terms entered. 
  • Use your alternate text on images! They say a picture is worth a 1,000 words, however Google's crawling robots which search the web and rank websites can't determine the value of an image. When creating your website, depending on the platform you've used, there'll be a way to add "alternate text" to an image, which if the image doesn't display, the text will instead. This is what the algorithms read, so picture of coffee beans won't mean much in search results, unless it's alternative text is "Quality coffee beans in Brisbane".
  • Link legitimately to your website often. From social media, emails, blogs or partner's websites. The algorithms determine that if everyone is linking to your site, it must have something people want. Be careful not to buy links or spam your links in comment sections. Google knows.
  • Have landing pages! Which means specific pages that answer specific questions. Google will see an entire page focused on exact question the search has entered, and rank it highly. If you have one line answers for a dozen questions, it doesn't look as valuable to Google's algorithms.
  • Know your target market! If you're selling to first time mums, don't write like you're selling to big corporation CEOs, or high school boys.

​If you need some help with your SEO, or aren't sure how to find what your audience is searching for:​
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