Digital Marketing 101: Why Great Web Design is Essential

It’s no secret that having a well designed and high performing website is important for any business looking to build an online presence and generate leads through the internet.

More businesses are looking to switch over to digital platforms and enter the competitive online marketing world of  SEO and paid search. As such, the demand for strong website design has increased. However, you may find yourself in a situation where you perhaps purchased a stock website that was built a few years back. In this case, you might find yourself reluctant to make changes to your current website design. 

This is very common in the world of online marketing. Websites and web design can cost a pretty penny. Why should you spend more money when you’re already paying for users to visit your website through various marketing campaigns (organic, PPC)?

You can argue, "Why should I upgrade my web design to help with SEO?" if you already have content present on your site and have more backlinks than your competitors.

You may think that web design isn’t important with PPC. That is, considering you’re already paying for users further along the marketing funnel to visit your online landing page.

These are valid concerns, but as mentioned earlier, digital marketing has become much more competitive. It is now forcing “players” in the game to step up their online presence and experience. You really have to dive in headfirst and take a well-diversified approach to win within Google’s newest requirements.

Google continues to roll out new updates that reward different websites based on a variety of standards. Moreover, winning in this game all boils down to an optimized, fast loading, and well-designed website.

Without a strong website, you’re going to have problems outranking competitors and converting users that are landing on your website. Let’s get into a few examples of why web design is so important and how it will help your business.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization operates and succeeds from strong performance in two areas: On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Google crawls millions of websites daily to give them the appropriate ranking. Because of this, it’s important to have your web design do the best it can by telling their bugs exactly what your web page is about.

It’s pretty clear that web design and on-page SEO go hand in hand. Let’s discuss how strong web design will help with your on-page SEO performance.

Page Formats and Headings:

In order to limit the risk of users exiting your website, it’s important to have a well designed and formatted webpage.

Start off with a photo banner in the fold that is reflective of what the service the page is about. Below the banner picture, ensure your H1 (the title of the page) is centred, or aligned to read left-to-right, has large font, and is clearly legible.

Break up the content below in several subheadings (H2’s/H3’s) with a font colour that matches the website colour scheme. Adding in roughly two images and perhaps a video is a great web design technique to help craft a good user experience and keep users on the site.

Implementing some case studies, testimonials, and FAQs serve as a great technique to provide credibility to users that land on your website.

At the footer of each page, effective web design should include a map, business hours, and contact information. Great web design leads users to the footer of your webpage, and you want to do your best to convert them as a lead.

Internal Linking:

Every page active on your website should include the appropriate interlink to another page on your website. Efficient web design should help label the interlinks in either the colour of your company brand or blue.

Another effective tool is to underline or bold each interlink so that it stands out to a user who lands on your web page and prompts them to click into another page.

This simple web design technique will improve your bounce rate and average page views per session. 

Responsive Design: 

Since Google rolled out the mobile-first indexing, your website must be optimized for mobile. If your web design is not mobile-friendly, expect to take a major hit in your keyword rankings and quality score.

Previously web designers only developed for desktop. This resulted in a poor experience for mobile. It created a landing environment where text, images, graphics, and video were not aligned properly and not visually appealing.

Moreover, it created a high bounce rate and penalized the success of SEO and PPC campaigns.

Page Speeds:

Google has gone public and said that page loading speed is, in fact, a ranking signal for SEO. It’s easy to spam your website with a bunch of exciting content, videos, and images in an attempt to build a creative landing environment for a user. 

However, site speeds can be heavily impacted when you continue to add content and rich media to your site. Effective web design will help make a strong and visually appealing website with strong site speeds.

Sitemap:

As you continue to grow your business and add more pages and content to your website, pages can become lost in transition.

It’s important to have a strong web design. This is so that you have all active pages present within your sitemap, and they're easy for users to find. The more difficult it is for a user to find a page, the harder it will be to rank.

Moreover, building sitemap extensions into the footer of your website is an effective way to help design strong user experience and increase on-page analytics.

Off-Page SEO:

As mentioned above, we identified plenty of different ways in which effective web design can be done with on-page SEO. If done correctly, it will help give the best return on investment with your organic optimization efforts.

Well, the same goes for off-page. Link building is not an easy process. Acquiring links from high domain authority websites won’t be easy with poor website design because they don't look like a professional business. This makes the solution pretty straight forward. A functional, appealing, SEO friendly and fast website will have much more ease acquiring backlinks than a poorly designed website.

Websites with higher domain authority and brand recognition will have less reason to deny a link exchange opportunity when you’re offering a rich website experience in return.

Pay Per Click Advertising:

If you want a high Ad Rank when entering Google’s Ad auction, you'll need to design a healthy landing web environment for your users. 

To improve the quality score of certain keywords you’re bidding on, you’re going to want to maximize your efforts creating a valuable landing page experience. This is where strong website design comes into play.

A well-designed landing page for your Google Ads campaigns will help improve your PPC performance in which the following variables will be optimized for success:

1. Strong user experience
   
2. Fast site speeds
   
3. Mobile/desktop friendly
   
4. High conversion rates

Conclusion

Your website is your business's most powerful tool to help you succeed online. Web design from both the back end and front end of your website is essential to outrank competitors and set a good impression to searchers that land on your website.

It’s essential to include web design as part of your digital marketing strategy. It serves as a critical variable in attracting traffic to your website and converting that traffic into business.