Designing your own website can be time-consuming and stressful. But making sure that you have an effective and efficient site will be well worth the time that you spend on it. Designing a website with best practices in mind will drive better business to your brand as well as increase the number of people buying your service. There’s nothing more annoying than a website that’s ugly, ineffective, and not user friendly. You want your customers to be taken in by your website and not click away immediately.
Website Design Best Practices for High Ranking Online
Don’t: Overcrowd Above-the-Fold Space
Above the fold refers to the content that is seen on the top half of the page, before the customer scrolls to see anything else. The most important information that the customer needs to know right away should be located above the fold. A critical mistake is overcrowding this section. It should be short, sweet, and to the point.
Do: Grab Attention Immediately
You want the space above the fold to be eye-catching and informative. You don’t want to put anything here that doesn’t matter or doesn’t need to be known right away. This space should be saved for minimal brand information, a picture or testimony, or an overview of the company. However, this website design best practice is incredibly important, as you don’t want the potential to click away because of poor design.
Do: Describe Who You Are and What You Do Up-Front
This is the best place to showcase who you are. Explain a little bit about yourself, how you got into the field, and why you’re the best person for the job. Testimonies are a great use for this, as they can help identify you not only as a trustworthy person for the job but speak to your skills and accomplishments.
What your business does needs to be in the above the fold section with absolutely no exceptions. If someone comes to your website and can’t figure out what you do within a few seconds, you’ve made a mistake. To avoid this, implement the best practice in your website design of making clear what your brand is and what services or products you offer.
Don’t: Exclude a Clear Call-to-Action
Every good business needs a call to action on their website. Without a call to action, you’re not asking your customers to do anything, and they likely won’t buy your service as they may not feel that they need it based on your website.
What is a call to action?
A call to action is a question or prompt that asks your clients to do something. This could be asking them to sign up for something or buy something. You have to prompt your clients, if there is no call to action, they’ll likely be confused about what you have to offer.
Do: Keep in Mind the End Goal – Client Conversion
When building your website, it’s important to keep in mind the point of it all, building relationships with your clients so that they’ll eventually purchase your service or product. Keep this in mind when placing a call to action on your website.
Don’t: Present an Unclear Brand Identity
An unclear brand identity is also a good way to drive away potential clients. If your brand isn’t unified, your customers may be confused about what you stand for. Having a solid brand theme can help to make it more clear.
Do: Use Brand Guides to Drive Color Scheme and Theme
Brands are based on their color schemes. McDonald’s has the signature red and yellow, Dunkin’ Donuts has pink and orange, and Starbucks has green. These colors reflect the brands and put out the right atmosphere. For example, if you had a website for a funeral home, you probably wouldn’t want to use bright and cheery colors. If you had a website for an amusement park, dark colors may not be your best option.
As a general website best practice, you want to create a relevant brand guide and stick to it.
Don’t: Clutter a Website and Confuse Users
Your website should also be simple and effective. If there are too many buttons and pages, your customers may get confused and overwhelmed about where to look first. Make your website as straightforward as you possibly can.
Do: Differentiate Yourself from Competitors
Look at competitors in your field and see what they’re doing with their websites. Think about who they cater to and how your brand is different from theirs. Use that information to differentiate yourself from other brands in your field.
Ask Yourself, Why Choose Us?
You need to think about why your clients would choose you over another brand and what makes you special. Play into that and make it a part of your brand. Highlight the things that make your company special.
Don’t: Apply Poor SEO Practices
SEO is an incredibly important component in making sure that your website and brand are both successful. With good SEO, more people will be able to find your site, and with poor SEO, your site may be impossible to find.
Do: Focus on Organic Ranking for Sustainable Growth
Organic ranking means that your website is ranked based on the content and work that you put into it, instead of because of sponsored posts and other advertisements. The more you increase the SEO content on your page, the more it will continue to grow.
Do: Continually Update Site and Provide Useful Information
You need to make sure that you’re regularly updating your website by posting blogs, updates, videos, and more. If your website hasn’t been updated in a while, it won’t be prioritized by search engines.
Every good website uses the best practice of consistent fresh content to keep your website relevant.
Don’t: Inconsistently Post Blog Content
Maintaining a blog can be difficult, but with a good content calendar and a plan, you can achieve the goals that you layout for your blog. Inconsistent blog posting can hurt your SEO score as well as drive away traffic. People like consistency, so if they’re waiting for you to post and you never do—they might stop checking for more content.
Why is it important to post blogs on your website?
Blogs not only help with ranking for certain subjects in SEO but also can help to build brand reliability. You should post content that has to do with what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling sneakers, you would want to post about new sneaker trends, the best sneakers of the year, and more. People will start going to your blog to read your content, and then they’ll have you in mind when they need to purchase something that you offer.
Do: Focus on Quality, Quantity, and Consistency With Blog Content
Your blog content should be consistent and well written. You should also put out as much quality content as you’re able to while still remaining consistent about it. These three are very much difficult to balance, but with a good content calendar, you can make sure that your content meets all three expectations.
Don’t: Slack on Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement is also incredibly important when it comes to driving traffic to your brand. Almost everyone uses a smartphone these days, and a large percentage of people are on some sort of social media website, including YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more.
Not everyone uses the same social media sites, and you can share content that can’t be found on your website, encouraging people to go to your website to learn more. With video content, like YouTube and TikTok, you can post long or short videos with a call to action, sending more traffic to your website while simultaneously increasing the amount of content you post.
Do: Engage with Users to Boost Brand Awareness
The more that you engage with your customers, the more people will know about your brand. The more they’ll recommend it to friends and families, and the more general awareness will be spread about you. Interact with your audience as much as you can on social media by answering questions and replying to comments.
Don’t: Feel Obligated to Market Yourself Alone
Just because it is “your” social media does not mean that you cannot get help with. Yes, your social media should be a reflection of you and your business and a true representation of your voice, but you can still help. Don’t feel like having someone help you with Facebook ads, or content ideas for Instagram, or using hashtag generators is cheating. It’s not.
Do: Hire a Digital Marketing Firm for Your Marketing Needs
Site Social SEO provides full-service digital marketing solutions for our clients. This includes content creation, content marketing, social media management, website design and maintenance, and SEO. With specialties in law firm SEO and medical clinic SEO, you can be sure that your business will continue growing through our partnership. When you hire us as your website designer, content creator, or brand manager, you can be sure that we will make ourselves available to you for collaboration as needed.
We work to implement best practices for website design and digital marketing so that your business can prosper. Our goal is to help your business do well in the online space.
What To Expect When You Contact Site Social SEO
Site Social SEO is a privately-owned small business operated out of Orlando, Florida. We have a small team of 6 people who are each managed by our two owners/lead strategists. We do not require contracts, make wild guarantees, or imply SEO is magic. It’s not; I can explain to you how everything we do will help your website and business. Contact us below for a free website evaluation or to learn more about our services. We look forward to helping you to grow your business so you can focus on the things that are important to you.
