- Mahmoud Grant
Website Design and SEO – Top Trends You Need To Execute in 2019
The statement “Your business should have a website” has sunk in really well.
Now everyone, their relatives and their pets seem to have a website, which is why the online ecosystem is getting crowded by the day.
As more and more websites get launched, it has become very hard to stand out and get noticed!
Well, website designing is essentially a creative process which not everyone is well-versed with.
Being a powerful medium of presentation, a website’s design is governed by some principles which every designer should consider.
After all – ‘With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility’!
So, what are the principles that can turn an ordinary website into a conversion machine?
How Should Websites Be Designed to increase Conversion?
Keep Your Design Balanced
Maintaining the ‘Balance of the Design’ is necessary. It should neither tip to one side nor should be asymmetrical.efr
For example, here’s Jason Beaird’s demonstration of a balanced design.
Source - https://www.subtraction.com/
Jason explains how the cross on the right balances the visual weight the dog forces on the left. This is a great example of asymmetrical balance and that is exactly what we are talking about.
Making conscious decisions when it comes to placing things on the website is highly recommended. The color, size and the addition or removal of elements should be well-manipulated to make the design seem like an entity.
If you don’t want to play around much, you can always go with symmetrical design just like this.
Source - http://www.thefirsttwenty.org/
Do you see how well-constructed this website design looks? It is simple and yet so powerful.cv
Pick Two or Three Base Colors at Most For Your Design
The color palette you choose for your website has a lot to do with how you want people to perceive personality of your brand or business.
You just cannot rush through this process as it requires good research and understanding of color combinations.
We believe that it all comes down to common sense and how you really feel about the website.
One of the ways we think can help you with color selection is soaking the various showcase websites on Best Web Gallery.
Well, picking the nice colors should not be put over picking the right colors. That’s majorly because every color has a message and it’s your responsibility to get the message right!
Here are some of the website designs we love because of their color choices.
Source - https://webdesignerwall.com/
We were mesmerized by the soft pastels on the website. At first, it will seem as if the colors are chosen at random. But, that’s not the case here.
Look closely and you will find that the website is using a strict color palette – the reason why the design looks so intact.
Follow Consistency and Uniformity in Design
Your website bounce rate will shoot up if you don’t practice consistency in its design.
Every website needs to function as an entity and have a consistent theme and design.
Of the seven website design principles discussed in this post, we want you to put this one on a pedestal while playing with the rest of them.
It’s because the consistency and uniformity will decide how the different elements of the design come together to help the user and improve his experience on the site.
This, undoubtedly, is the hardest part of the design and is not something that can be easily taught.
We highly recommend consulting website design professionals at any digital marketing agency for this as it can really be a game-changer for your website’s performance.
But, is design the only thing that can improve the conversion power of a website?
What about the ability to reach more people? What about search engine visibility?
Well, for a website to perform the best, it has to also go through major Search Engine Optimization to make sure it has all the fundamentals to get indexed by popular search engines like Google.
So, how can one ensure a better Search Engine Optimization?
Let’s discuss.
Top Website SEO Trends to Follow for Better Google Ranking
With technology keeps getting advanced, it has become vital for you to keep up with the changes and execute new SEO strategies on your small business marketing.
Trends and tactics in SEO are changing incessantly. Therefore, we have compiled a list of the 5 most important SEO trends you should consider in 2019.
Prepare for Artificial Intelligence
AI is the future we are all looking forward to and it is definitely going to affect the SEO ecosystem. Google has already started using AI through extensive RankBrain execution which thrives on machine learning.
Artificial Intelligence will help you fix the bugs and irregularities on your website quickly. The Wordlift plugin on WordPress is a prime example of how machine learning is going to affect content management.
Not just that, AI can also be used for effective keyword research and generation using AI-powered keyword research tools. Predictive analysis has also leveraged machine learning and can be taken advantage of using Google Trends.
Make Your Website Voice Search Friendly
In a fast-paced life, Voice will certainly become a common trend in the future. Since we are observing the early adoption of this trend, we highly recommend optimizing your websites for Voice search.
Google has claimed that one-fifth of all queries it receives is through Voice and people of all age groups are actively using the feature.
Voice is a great technology that has the potential to help you improve the user experience with the effective use of semantics and preferences. Coupled with machine learning, Voice search can become more intuitive, making the user experience more smooth and perceptive.
Use conversational key phrases in the title tags, meta tags, internal links, and anchor texts as it will improve the chances of your website getting indexed for such conversational keywords.
Speed Optimization for Efficiency
Recent studies show that customers don’t wait more than 7 seconds for a page to load.
Slow pages disturb the user experience and therefore, will not be entertained by Google. This simply means one thing – the rankings for your website will drop if the loading speed doesn’t improve.
You can boost the loading speed by choosing the best website hosting, not loading heavy images, installing only a few ads, and installing a simple website theme.
You can check your website’s speed on Google’s Page Speed tool and get a score with improvement suggestions.
Improve Website’s Mobile Pages
Google has blatantly thrashed websites that do not care about mobile visitors. The rankings for such websites have significantly dropped and will not improve unless they optimize them for mobile users.
Therefore, creating a mobile-friendly and responsive website is the need of a perfect small business marketing strategy. A website optimized for mobile will receive more customer engagement and traffic if it responds well to the different screen configuration of mobile devices.
We highly recommend testing your website on multiple devices and setting them up in the most efficient way. Customer engagement and user experience have to have the most say when designing a mobile-friendly website.
Use Social Media for Maximum Impact
Social Media has proved to be an important factor when it comes to improving the rankings of a website.
In 2019, it is crucial to have a highly optimized social media presence on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter.
Generating traffic from social media and driving it to your website is highly recommended. You can do that by posting highly valuable content on your social media accounts and provide an effective CTA that makes your audience curious.
Google will rank your website higher once it notices that your website is generating traffic from a social media network which generally has a high domain authority.
Over to You
We highly recommend consulting website design professionals for executing the above optimizations and design tweaks as these can really be a game-changer for your website’s performance. There are many agencies out there - find the one that fits best to your and your business!
We at Media Number Seven are passionate about finding an individual approach for your website design and SEO strategies. We look at every business as a unique case, & instead of using a "one-fits-all" template, we reverse engineer a tailored strategy for it!
We are at our best when it comes to creating together with you - finding ideas, defining a strategy for your brand and using digital marketing tools to boost your business - with measurable results!
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