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SEO UI Design Web Design

The Importance of Content in Web Designing

Designers around the globe may argue that the most essential aspect of a web design’s success is its visual appeal, and that content is secondary. But, the truth of the matter is that no matter how good and appealing your website may be, it will not be able to achieve success unless it is designed and developed based on solid, useful content in web designing. Great content is what sets your website apart from the masses and delivers the right message to your audience. 

The success of your website is determined primarily by its content. All other components of your website (design, visuals, videos, etc.) provide a secondary support role. The key to a successful website is having clear, relevant, and keyword-rich content that delivers the right message with power and conviction. The content for web designing should target your audience, engage them, and persuade them to take action.

Before you get started with the web design process, make sure that you have the content ready with you. The reason being, your website needs to be built around the content, not the other way round. Here are a few reasons why content is more important than it looks.

SEO

One of the benefits of publishing good content is that it will increase the number of people who find your website through search engines. Search engines love content, especially frequently updated content. Content is the most significant catalyst when it comes to boosting your SEO. Google checks the content quality of a website to determine its ranking. It reviews the relevancy and authenticity of the content to the subject topic. 

There are so many websites on the internet that have amazingly beautiful homepages, but no relevant content at all. In most of the cases, the homepage is the most frequently visited page of a website and therefore it should contain information about what you do, who you are and what you offer. This is one of the main reasons why scrolling websites have become so popular in recent times. If your site contains less information and content, it will be difficult for Google to identify what your website is about, and it will impact your ranking in search results. Visitor traffic, business visibility, and sales will all increase with higher search engine rankings, which is only possible by creating and offering high-quality content while web designing.

User Experience

High-quality website content enhances usability. Usability can range from the navigation of your site to the ease of use for visitors, to the accessibility of your content and to the interconnection between relevant pieces of content. When relevant and useful content is easy to locate, it results in better user experience and more satisfied visitors. If visitors don’t find your website easy to use, then they are more likely to bounce off and visit competitors’ sites instead. A high bounce rate means a loss to the business.

No matter how good the design and functionality of a website is, if the content is poor, the overall user experience will be disappointing. Visitors come to your website for information; to seek answers to their queries. They also want to find out about you, your services, and/or products. They want to know how are your offerings are unique and different from your competitors. They want to know your contact details, your business hours, the experience of clients using your products/services, and a lot more. This is all content and must be available for visitors. Importantly, the content must be available at convenient locations, where people expect it to be. If they have to search rigorously on your website to seek their answers, that’s negative user experience.

Sales generation

Building trust is a vital part of sales generation for any business. One of the important ways of creating that trust is by establishing yourself as an industry thought leader and authority, through the content you produce. In terms of sales generation, good content can be especially useful if you know how to drill down on your targeted demographics and guide them to the purchase.

An estimated 77% of consumers read online content before making a purchase decision. Publishing product-specific content such as FAQs, product reviews, and instructional videos or blog posts can help reassure potential customers and lead to sales. Add screenshots to reviews and include videos where possible. Videos create a next-level impact. Always use a conversational tone while writing and create blog posts on trending, relevant topics. Provide links between the content which can lead the reader to the related product or service. It is an effective way of generating sales.

Competitive Edge

The sole purpose of a website is to showcase a business and its offerings. We all want to attract customers and words play a vital role in enticing potential buyers or clients. People buy from people, and you are more likely to stand out over your competitors by making a connection with your customers by offering them the right content.

As a business, you would have to do things differently and bring your personality at the forefront to attract customers; do this through your website copy. Use your website content to highlight what makes you different, and why a potential client should choose you over someone else in your industry. Make valuable connections with your website visitors to gain a competitive advantage.

Content Is More Than Just Text

Content doesn’t always come in the form of text. Visuals, especially videos, on websites are changing the way important messages are communicated. Visitors expect to get the information they need effortlessly. Custom videos provide a great way to engage audiences and drive essential messaging in a format that requires less effort than reading large amounts of text. Additionally, illustrations, infographics, diagrams, and interactive presentations are often used to explain difficult concepts and help users in taking decisions.

Market Your Content

Even great content will not be able to become effective content, if not marketed properly. Content Marketing involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content to acquire customers. This information can be presented in a variety of formats, including blog posts, news, videos, white papers, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, photos, etc. Content Marketing is one of the best methodologies for marketing your website and your business. Posting relevant, valuable, and frequently updated information on your website will also boost your search ranking and will allow you to build long-lasting relationships with your audience.

Conclusion

Good quality content while web designing is pivotal to the success of your website. It helps in achieving better Google search rankings, enhanced user experience, and leads to more sales. An aesthetical appeal is also important, but the content is the base of any website. Just like web designing, copywriting also requires expertise. Therefore, you must consider hiring a professional copywriter to create your content. Talk to our team of experts now!

Read more about how to design a content-heavy website

Categories
Design SEO Web Design

5 Ways To Improve Website Performance By Combining Web Design And SEO

In today’s world, where approximately 93% of the buying circles start on the internet, it’s critically important to maintain a high-performing website. And, you must realize that there are several factors which should be considered while trying to improve your website performance. For starters, your website must rank high in Google search to enhance your presence. The better you rank, the more is your web traffic and conversions. People think that only focusing on SEO will fetch them high rankings. Well, it takes more than just SEO. Your website also needs to be designed well, or you risk blowing away all the organic traffic.

SEO and web design go hand-in-hand more seamlessly than many people might realize. Their components mingle and flow together so well that, when executed correctly, your visitors should simply start navigating through your site, without actually noticing anything about what you have created.

So, what are those elements where SEO and web design collaborate? Let’s check them out.

1. Mobile-Friendliness

Anyone who’s even slightly familiar with SEO or web design should already know the importance of making your website mobile-friendly. Google made mobile-friendliness a ranking factor in 2015. It then introduced mobile-first indexing in 2017. It’s obvious how much importance Google gives to mobile-friendliness. Sill, a lot of websites don’t acknowledge the importance of creating a mobile-friendly website.

Read More About Mobile-First Indexing Here

The trend of searching has changed over the last decade or so. People are searching more on hand-held devices, especially mobiles, and searching less on desktops; the number is steadily increasing. More than 50% of all web traffic is driven by mobile devices, which means more than 50% of your audience is most likely to be accessing your website through mobile phones. Without a mobile-friendly website design, you could be unintentionally squandering half of your users. If your website has a high bounce rate due to not loading properly on a phone or tablet is going to send wrong signals to Google, and your rankings will tumble down.

2. Website Speed

We all know how important website speed is for the success of a business. People on the internet are impatient, and they want answers to their questions within seconds.  If you haven’t been ranking well, it could be that your website is just too slow and people are bouncing quickly.

And, If your website loading speed is slow, you must know what’s slowing your website down? It could be something to do with your web design. Website speed is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO, and it’s a primary deficiency for many websites.

Ideally, your website should load in two seconds. When it takes longer than three seconds, half the users visiting your site are likely to abandon it. Page speed is more critical on mobile devices, where people are even less likely to spend time waiting. Web designers can consider various elements like image optimization, content suppression, CSS optimization, etc. to speed up the site.

3. Sitemaps

Web design can help with the crawling of your website in more than one way. A sitemap is a crucial element to have in place if you want search engines to be smarter about how they crawl your website. Your sitemap provides search engines with a guide of all the pages and content on your website. This gives you the chance to tell search engines what pages are most important to your site.

In addition to their benefit to search engines, sitemaps also aid in user navigation. A new visitor to your site can refer to your sitemap to get around it. Sitemaps also contain essential metadata about your web pages to give them a better chance of ranking highly.

4. Easy-to-Read Design

If you’ve been working on improving your SEO, you would have been focusing a lot on the content. Some people might not realize what a huge impact the design of a website can have on your content, or at least the presentation and structure of it. A poorly designed website can make it impossible for users to read the information on your website. Oddly placed content blocks, with a lot of hyperlinks, don’t serve a clear purpose. 

At some point, you’ve probably been on a website that had a text that was impossible to read because of the page design. Maybe it was a light-colored text on a pure white background or a dark color on black. But the issue is not always color. The text may also be too big or small or written in a hard-to-read font. Like websites that aren’t mobile-friendly, sites that are difficult to read on any device or desktop are going to turn people away quickly. 

Web designers understand how to create websites that make it easy for users to absorb your content, so you get the most for your money. White space, line length, and any extra elements such as images can all affect how people pay attention to your site. Also, remember to consider people with disabilities by going for an inclusive web design format.

5. User Experience and Trust

Unlike some other SEO factors, you really cannot measure how much people trust you or your website. However, gaining trust is still a huge part of getting your website to rank higher. There’s no doubt that most people are quick to form opinions, and once they have them, it can be challenging to change their minds. Over the years, we have gotten used to seeing perfected websites that provide phenomenal user experiences. This is what we naturally expect to see when we open a website. We want something clean, easy to navigate, and that can quickly give us the information we want. We tend to think these kinds of sites seem more trustworthy.

If a website looks old and outdated or is too difficult to use, most people will be left with a bad impression, and they could leave and not come back. You could have a product or service that might be exactly what they are looking for, but your website doesn’t convey this. A bad website will make it look like your business or organization simply doesn’t put in much effort.

Conclusion

Higher ranking in popular search engines is crucial, for which SEO is vital. But, not just SEO. If the best practices of website designing are carried hand-in-hand with best SEO practices, your website will become more efficient and perform better. Please speak to our web design experts for more details.