Gone are the days when websites were like online brochures simply offering a little information about the brand. It didn’t matter whether they influenced the purchase decision or not.
Lead generation was done using traditional lead generation methods. But today, a website has become an essential medium to generate leads for a brand. It is, therefore, important to design an effective website that can assist buyers in their research while generating qualified leads for the business.
Designing An Effective Website
This blog talks about what goes into designing an effective website design for your business. So, read on to know how you can build a site that will attract, engage and convert prospects.
Let’s start!
Elements of Designing an Effective Website
Simply said, an effective website is one that generates leads for your business. To be more specific, the website should generate leads regularly to ensure your business growth.
There are 3 objectives that you have to set while designing an effective website:
- Your website must be discoverable through organic search and relevant channels. It must have traffic.
- It must engage visitors by establishing an instant connection and providing a positive customer journey.
- Your website needs to convert a visitor through proper assistance
Also read: The Ideal Process Of Designing A Website Page
Designing such an effective website will need time and patience. All you need to do is focus on taking a buyer-centric approach and follow these steps:
Research
The first step towards creating an effective website is research. There’s a lot to learn from the current market scenario and applied to the website design.
Well, what do we have to research then?
1. The Current Site
Start your research at your current site. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console for the work.
2. Your Competitors
Researching your competition is the next step. Look at the competitor’s website to find out what works and what doesn’t for your industry. Also, look out for their website design. Ensure that your website design doesn’t look very similar to theirs.
3. Current Trends & Content Ideas
Getting hold of the trending content is a must. In the digital world, what works keeps changing. So, you have to research and find out what is working currently.
Strategy
1. What’s Your Value Proposition?
One of the most significant components of a website is a clear and precise value proposition. To fulfill the goal of engagement, your website needs to establish a connection with the visitors. And to do this, you need to be clear about who you are and what you do.
2. Do You Have a Keyword Strategy?
Effective websites always have a keyword strategy so that buyers come across it at all stages of the buying process.
Before designing the website, be ready with your keyword strategy. Identify the target keywords and use them in your URLs, page names, and content. Also, ensure that your blogs and other content marketing pieces are in support of your keyword strategy. This will help you to raise the rank in terms of competitiveness.
Developing a Plan
1. Sitemap
In an effective website, a sitemap is important because it shows what pages your website will have and where they will be placed within your site.
Sitemaps for different websites are different. Buyers do not visit the website to spend a lot of time. So, you have to cut down on the number of pages wherever possible.
2. Speed & Navigation
These features are often overlooked. But they are two of the main components of an effective website.
What’s the use of creating attractive content if your navigation isn’t hassle-free?! Furthermore, if your website page takes hours to load, visitors will not be able to focus on what you are offering.
Work with the web development team and ensure that your website is fast enough. Provide navigation menus, search box, categorize products/services and make it convenient for visitors to find what they’re looking for easily.
The next big thing about navigation is the placement of CTAs. Don’t make your visitors search for your contact throughout your website. Use buttons, chat features, pop-ups and a contact page that can be easily found.
3. Agile Delivery
Confused as to what agile delivery means? It is how you undertake the website designing process.
Let us make it clearer. The businesses that haven’t yet evolved use the traditional web design approach wherein they spend long months to create every page of the website and then, finally launch it.
There are certain risks with this approach:
- When you finally launch the website after 6 months, strategies, product, market or buyers might change
- You put in your maximum cost and time before seeing any ROI
To avoid these complications, we have the growth-driven approach which is based on agile delivery.
Using this approach, you build a minimum viable product (website in this case) and launch it as quickly as possible. Then you put in the efforts to make continuous improvements.
You can easily go for an agile delivery approach considering the following steps:
- Prioritize pages and features of your website
- Use a sitemap and know which pages are a must for the website to go live
- Launch the first batch of pages
Also Read: Why You Should Revamp Your Website Every 2.6 Years
Designing the Website
1. Wireframes First!
Create wireframes using Figma, Sketch, etc. to get an idea of the website design. This is an important step in building an effective website.
Working with wireframes and copies will help you understand the customer’s journey through each website page and the website in its entirety.
2. Create a Design for Your Homepage
Creating the perfect homepage design often comes off as a challenge because it might be the first page a prospect will visit. Whether visitors will stay or bounce – a lot depends on the home page.
Design a home page that’s appealing and informative. Design it in a way that will convey your brand’s story. Start with an attractive and relevant hero image, a brand statement, short videos like a sales pitch, animations, images, and short customer reviews or their brand logos.
Optimization
1. Optimize the Lead Conversions
An effective website is a pro at converting visitors into opportunities, leads, or customers.
We have seen websites with a contact page but this generally doesn’t work out very well for visitors. For instance, ‘contact me’ is quite vague or maybe as customers jump from one to another, there’s a long way to travel back to the ‘contact me’ button. This design turns out to be not-so-good at generating leads.
The solution to this problem is providing multiple conversion points throughout the website. No matter which page the visitors jump to, there will be a conversion point and they do not have to travel back like in the above scenario.
Also Read: Need A Better Converting B2B Website? Follow These 5 Design Principles
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is important to optimize your website for organic search. You can do this by,
- Creating unique page meta titles and meta descriptions with the inclusion of common keywords in your industry
- Using the target keywords in your H1 tag and the body
- Inter-linking pages using the keyword as an anchor text
Keep your keyword strategy handy and use it well when optimizing your website. However, do not over-stuff your website with keywords as it will affect your ranking.
Here are few SEO recommendations you can use:
- Use industry-specific keywords: For example, if you are in the project management SaaS industry, use the keywords ‘project management ideas’ and ‘project management tools’. Though the volume of organic search of these keywords may not be high, these types of visitors ultimately become lead opportunities.
- Use long-tail-related variations of your core keyword: For example, your core solution-specific keyword is ‘project management’. Then, use keyword variations like ‘project management for SMEs’ or ‘project management ideas for agencies’.
Wrapping Up…
Nobody wants to see an online brochure. So, don’t spend your months (and bucks, of course!) creating something that won’t interest your buyers.
Get hold of a vision about your website and start working on it following these guidelines. Create a plan and dive right in to launch something that will take your business to the next level.