Website Design for Business Results
Today's Internet is social and interactive. It’s not static like most company websites tend to be. As such, a website can no longer sustain itself alone. A modern business website must be part of a comprehensive marketing strategy integrated with search, social media, content, blogging, and more.
The shift toward a comprehensive marketing strategy is largely driven by changing buyer behavior. Consumers no longer rely on traditional methods when researching products or services. They seek information online, on their own terms, and often without the involvement of a salesperson. More importantly, they want to be educated, not sold to. This change presents unique opportunities for businesses that can adapt to it.
Most of this shopper research starts on a search engine. Websites and new forms of inbound marketing content, such as video, podcasts, blogs, and social media, have become primary factors in the consumer’s buying cycle. Meanwhile, traditional, outbound marketing methods like television commercials, direct mail, and telemarketing have become less effective, signaling the urgent need for a shift in marketing strategies. Savvy consumers, armed with information and aware of their privacy, skip past ads, block unknown numbers, and are increasingly cautious about handing over their precious contact information.
Marketers are turning to inbound marketing methods, redeveloping their company website, and using other online channels to generate leads and increase sales. This shift aligns with changing buyer behavior and opens new opportunities for engagement and growth, giving you, as a marketing director, a chance to explore and innovate in your company's digital space.
In today’s marketplace, your website is not just a digital brochure, it's your most important marketing tool. It’s the hub of your inbound marketing efforts, the destination for visitors who find your site through search engines, digital ads, social media, or from the URL on your business card. Making changes to your website should always aim to benefit your business.
This guide is designed to equip you with tips and tools to manage a website design project that supports your inbound marketing efforts, enhances your brand presence, and drives measurable results for your business.
Why Should a Company Redesign Its Website?
Redesigning your website should not be taken lightly. It’s not simply about changing colors to match a new corporate look and feel or because it’s been a year since the last redesign. Your decision to revamp your website should be made within the context of three simple goals:
- More Visitors
- More Leads
- More Customers
Everything else is secondary. New colors and flashy graphics enhance the look of a website. Still, they are only useful if they improve usability and convert visitors into leads who fill out your contact form or call your company. While these changes may make the office staff happy, you will soon feel pressure to redesign the site again if they don’t produce results.
Ultimately, visitors browse websites to get information. Therefore, a complete site revamp, even for the right reasons, can cause confusion if visitors cannot find the information they want on your site. Keep regular users in mind as you move ahead with your website design plan. Rather than redesign your website from scratch, you might consider:
- Adding more web content on your current site that answers the questions your customers frequently ask.
- Creating premium content offers and calls to action to increase conversions.
- Optimizing landing pages to improve search rankings.
- Improving navigation to make the user experience more intuitive.
Bottom Line
Do not be distracted by the idea that the freshness and “wow factor” of a new website will increase excitement for your brand. The primary motivation for re-developing any website should be to improve performance.
How Often Should a Company Redesign Its Website?
The lifespan of a website depends on several factors, such as industry, technology trends, and user preferences. However, a website should generally be redesigned every 2-3 years to keep up with the latest web technology, design trends, user behavior, and search engine algorithms. Here are some signs that your website needs a redesign:
Outdated Design
An outdated design can make your website look unprofessional and poorly reflect your brand. If your website design looks like it was built for the AOL browser, it’s time for an update. Modern web design trends focus on clean, minimalistic layouts, intuitive navigation, and mobile responsiveness.
Poor User Experience
User experience (UX) is critical to your website’s success. If visitors find it difficult to navigate your site or can’t find the information they’re looking for, they’ll leave. High bounce rates and low time-on-site metrics are indicators that your UX needs improvement.
Slow Loading Speeds
In today’s fast-paced world, people have little patience for slow-loading websites. According to Google, as page load time goes from one second to ten seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases by 123%. If your website takes too long to load, it’s time for a redesign focused on speed optimization.
Not Mobile-Friendly
With more than half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is no longer optional. If your site isn’t optimized for mobile, you’re missing out on a significant number of potential customers.
Low Search Engine Rankings
If your website isn’t ranking well on search engine results pages (SERPs), it could be due to outdated SEO practices or technical issues. A redesign can help address these issues and improve your site’s visibility.
Bottom Line
The consideration for a company redesigning its website should revolve around its performance. Do you get enough visitors to your website? Does your website generate enough qualified leads for your sales team? If so, keep up the good work, and keep reading for tips to supercharge your results.
Set SMART Goals for Your Website Design
Before embarking on a website redesign, setting clear goals is essential. We identified the three broad goals of your website design above:
- More Visitors
- More Leads
- More Customers
Narrowing these broad goals to suit your business objectives will guide your website design process.
Is your goal to:
- Increase website traffic?
- Increase time on site?
- Convert more leads?
- Increase sales?
Using the SMART goal-setting technique is a useful guide for your future website project decisions.
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Timely
It’s important to set reasonable and realistic goals. If you want to increase leads on your low-traffic website but have no plan for increasing traffic, that’s not a realistic goal.
Once you define your goals and determine the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure those goals, you’re ready to take your baseline measurements. Then, once your website is finished, you can continue monitoring your KPIs to track the success of your new website.
Identify and Keep Website Features That Work
So, you’ve decided to move ahead with your new website design. That doesn’t mean you have to throw away everything that works. Identify the features and elements that work well and retain them in your new design. This might include popular content, effective calls-to-action (CTAs), or a well-performing blog section.
If the URL of a popular feature will be changed during the redesign, be sure to provide clear directions or links for returning visitors to find it. Better yet, create a 301 redirect to point search engines to the new location. Here are some other questions to consider:
- How many pages are on your current website?
- Which pages are most popular/powerful?
- How many inbound links do you have?
- Where do these links come from?
- What interior pages have inbound links?
- Which inbound links are most popular/powerful?
- Which keywords are most effective?
Review this checklist before starting your website design process. It will help determine the scope of your project with your website designer and affect search engine optimization (SEO), keyword research, navigation, and design.
Bottom Line
If you do not fully understand the importance and practice of proper SEO, a poorly planned website redesign can be more damaging than helpful. Consider hiring a website development agency to perform the redesign so all the hard work you have put into your company's web presence does not disappear. Your website developer can also set up a system to track your important KPIs and report back to you on your website performance.
Focus on Creative Content Marketing
Visitors search for websites that provide the information they want. High-quality, relevant content can attract and retain visitors, improve your search engine rankings, and establish your authority in your industry. When redesigning your website, create engaging and valuable content that addresses your audience’s needs.
A successful website isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it project. It’s a simple equation:
More Website Pages = More Visitors = More Leads and Conversions
Every web page is an opportunity to be indexed by a search engine and found by a website visitor. To a search engine, a 100-page website is better than a 10-page site, and a 500-page site is better IF the content is valuable. Make sure you have a strategy for adding new, original content to your website regularly.
Regularly updating your content keeps your site fresh and relevant, encourages repeat visits, and boosts your SEO efforts. Develop a content calendar to plan and organize your content creation efforts.
Perhaps the easiest method to continuously add new content to your website is to write a blog. Each new blog you publish is fresh content for your website. Consider these benefits of blogging:
- Websites with active blogs have 434% more indexed pages and 97% more inbound links than those without. (BKA Content)
- Companies that blog get 55% more website visitors than businesses that don't. (HubSpot)
- Companies with blogs produce an average of 67% more leads monthly than companies that don't blog. (DemandMetric)
In addition to blogging, here are several other ideas to consider to increase the content on your website:
- Create informative videos. HubSpot says short-form video is the #1 format, offering the highest ROI.
TIP: Remix your blog articles to create scripts for short-form videos.
- Start a podcast. Interview your internal experts or happy customers to talk about your industry.
- Write case studies and application profiles.
- Add client testimonials or success stories.
- Create a resource library for visitors to access all the helpful content, including blogs, podcasts, videos, whitepapers, eBooks, guides, etc.
Think you don’t have much to talk about? If your business is like most, you probably already have content that, with a little repurposing, would make several great blog topics. Here are a few places to find great topics for your website content:
- Company brochures
- Product information sheets
- Presentation slide decks
- Sales pitches
- Brainstorm ideas with other employees in the office
- Ask customers what they’d like to know more about
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Describe how news or current events affect your industry
- Check the websites of your suppliers, vendors, and competitors
Bottom Line
Content creation should be an ongoing effort in your website strategy. By consistently publishing valuable content on your website, you can attract and retain visitors, establish yourself as an authority in your industry, and improve your search engine rankings.
Create Compelling Landing Pages
Creative content and successful SEO can drive a lot of traffic to a website. But remember the goals we set earlier for your new website:
- More Visitors
- More Leads
- More Customers
Traffic alone is not enough. Visitors must convert to leads and eventually customers by voluntarily providing their contact information in exchange for content on your site.
Converting website visitors into leads takes place on special web pages called landing pages. A landing page is an internal web page where a visitor is redirected after following a call to action. For example, a visitor may “click here” on a link, button, or ad to download a whitepaper offer that you've created. The landing page is where they are redirected to fill out a form to retrieve the offer.
Landing pages are critical for lead generation. They should be designed to capture visitors’ attention and encourage them to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a content offer. Your landing pages should be visually appealing, have clear CTAs, and be aligned with your overall marketing goals.
Landing pages are a great place to showcase your products and services and are great tools for monitoring results. However, successful landing pages require the ability to monitor, experiment, and improve them quickly. If you depend on your IT department to provide data, such as the number of visitors or form fills, and make changes to your landing pages, you will not be able to adapt to changing trends and risk missing opportunities to convert visitors into leads.
Some key concepts for improving your landing pages:
- Do not include website navigation. Avoid distractions by focusing the visitor’s attention on one thing – filling out the form on your landing page.
- Keep the description of your offer clear and concise. Focus on the benefits the visitor will gain from downloading your offer.
- Keep the form above the fold. Make it easy for the user to find by avoiding scrolling.
- Make the form as short as possible. Including many form fields will capture more visitor data that could help qualify your leads, but it also makes for a long form that may turn visitors away from filling it out.
To maximize efficiency, consider these questions:
- How fast can you launch a new landing page?
- Can one person do it in 15 minutes?
- What is the cost of experimentation?
A good landing page is one that can be set up and modified in minutes, allowing you to experiment, monitor, and continuously improve its performance.
Bottom Line
Landing pages are where the magic happens. They are the gateway to your conversion offers, which create engaged and interested leads. Make sure you can grab their attention with an interesting offer and coherently explain what is being offered on the landing page!
Your website development “project” may be complete. But remember, your website is a business tool, and you should expect it to deliver business results based on your goals. To be successful, it will require ongoing content creation, monitoring, and improvement.
After launching your redesigned website, it’s essential to monitor its performance. Use tools like Google Analytics to track key website metrics such as traffic, bounce rates, conversion rates, and user behavior. This data will help you identify areas for improvement and measure the success of your redesign.
In addition to metrics that track the technical performance of your website, also monitor KPIs that measure how well your website is performing against the stated goals:
Visitors
- How many people are coming to my website?
- Where are website visitors coming from?
- Which of your website pages are they visiting most?
Leads
- How many visitors converted to leads?
- What landing pages did they visit?
- Which offers were downloaded most?
- How many form submissions were there
Sales
- How many leads converted to sales-qualified leads (SQLs)?
- How many SQLs became customers?
- How much revenue did that produce?
These metrics will help you determine what parts of your website need attention and possible revision over time.
Bottom Line
Metrics are pivotal for pinpointing your website's exact pain points. By making incremental adjustments to the site, you can maximize its utility so that it becomes a platform for generating visitors, leads, and, ultimately, sales.
At Heinzeroth Marketing Group, we can help make sense of your website data to achieve your goals so you can focus on your primary business objective – closing more customers.
Conclusion
The Internet has profoundly shifted consumer behavior and redefined business success. As most shoppers start their buying journey online, your company's digital presence is essential, and maintaining an updated and optimized website is paramount. A strategic website redesign every few years ensures that your site stays relevant, engaging, and competitive with current trends and user expectations. By focusing on increased engagement through well-crafted landing pages, rigorous metric monitoring, and continuous content enhancement, your website can drive traffic, generate quality leads, and ultimately increase sales.
Bottom Line
Your website is not a one-time project but an ongoing tool for attracting and converting customers. Stay on top of industry trends, monitor performance metrics, and continuously improve your website to stay ahead in the digital landscape. Trust Heinzeroth Marketing Group to be your website design agency and create a successful website that drives business results.
