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Is your website user experience up to scratch?

05/27/202109/10/2020 by scmarketing

The user experience (UX) plays a fundamental role in the success for any business’s online digital marketing strategy. The reason being is that if your UX is not up to scratch then you can easily lose a prospect who has just clicked on your website having found you in search.

With your website at the centre of your digital world, the user experience is vital to the business growth strategy of the firm. You need to keep your prospects on your website as long as possible to increase the chance of a sale or further engagement with you.

Make updates to your website

It’s worth always checking back on your website for a little refresh and update where necessary. Let’s face it when your website was designed and built you may have expanded the services you offer and be looking to add more interactive elements than you had previously. Therefore, taking a step back and looking with a fresh eye will help you see where gaps need to be plugged.

47% of website visitors view the products/services pages before any other sections of a website. With this in mind, take a look at one of your core product or services web pages and really question whether it does what it says on the tin.

Are you giving visitors to your web page enough information?
Are you giving top tips that they can take away that will help them grow their business?
Have you added internal links to aid navigation on your website further?
Have you included clear call to actions?

These are just some of the key questions to ask yourself to help update your website. But don’t forget the design – how does the website look? Is it time to update your images or add more? Be ruthless, as that’s what your potential customers will be doing! They could be telling their colleagues and friends about the website experience is.

Digital marketing plan

With competition rife, being critical about your website will help you in the long run. Add a website review to your core digital marketing plan to ensure that you regularly set time in the calendar to take a look over your site and make any necessary changes to content or design.

You’ll find this is good for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) purposes too as regular updates with fresh content and relevant keywords are noted by search engines.

Website landing pages

With many customers now looking to conduct paid advertising such as with Google Adwords, the UX is also an intrinsic part of the success of a PPC campaign. Having a great landing page relevant to the ad makes for a much smoother customer journey. A lead wants just one click to find out exactly what they want.

Over half (51%) of people believe thorough contact information is the most important item missing from many company websites. So, don’t let this be missing when your lead clicks your ad!

Web design Croydon

We’re web developers in Croydon working with clients across Croydon and South London. We can provide a Free Website Review. The knowledge gained from this can guide on any website updates that may be required to help improve your online presence and turn enquiries into customers.

Whether you want a new website designed and developed or just need a refresh, we can guide on the best strategy for optimisation. We can create WordPress web design and content managed system so that you can be in control of your site once it is complete.

3 steps for website improvement

06/01/202109/01/2020 by scmarketing

While you may find that you fixate on the website design initially, you must always consider the look of your site alongside the overall user experience at design and development stage.

When working with a web designer take a collaborative approach, have your ideas for the website appearance, but be open to tips about website structure and navigation that will come from years of experience.

Here we provide three areas of focus that will help you create a winning website whether it’s a new site or you’re embarking on updating your current website.

1. Understand your website user

Your web content needs to be of interest to your target audience. A website today is not just about nice pictures and text, it’s much more than a brochure site. It’s a place where you want to send all web traffic, whether from links on social posts, online advertising or guest blogs. So, you need engaging content to keep visitors on your website. You can only do this by understanding the challenges and demands that your clients and prospects are facing to ensure that your content gives them answers to their questions.

Whether you’re selling products or services, help them to find information and pricing simply. We understand that in some sectors, such as accounting, it may not be a one size fits all approach to pricing as services are tailored to each client. However, a call to action offering a free consultation to discuss requirements can be helpful. But, where you can list baseline prices such as ‘starting from’, this can help push that initial engagement.

Your content marketing strategy should include regular writing for your website for a blog/news page. We work a lot with professional services firms such as accountants and this is such a key area to always contribute to as it helps with website optimisation your position in organic search engine results pages (SERPs).

Video content towards the top of the page is also an engaging way to keep a visitor on your site. But again, the content is key and needs to be focussed to your audience.

Read our blog about creating an online persona for your business as this will help you with tailoring content specifically for your audience.

2. Ease of navigation

Once you get people to your website, it needs to be a smooth journey for them to move from page to page. Having a website that is easy to navigate will help people stay on your website for longer and give more chance of a sale.

Have a look at your website and check the menu and homepage, are you covering the questions that your target audience will ask? Is it easy for them to find contact details and get in touch with you? Is your menu offering the right options and is it clear?

Ensure you have bold call to actions and white space that can lead the visitor simply around the page – avoid too much clutter.

If you’ve written a blog add in internal links to relevant pages that can help further guide a visitor to other pages of interest.

3. Be mobile responsive

Globally 52% of web traffic comes from a mobile. This will only increase as the world conducts more transactions online and uses search on their mobile. If your website isn’t already mobile friendly, then now is the time to look for a new website design. If you are already mobile friendly, then always check how updates look on your mobile. As you constantly add blogs, new call to actions of pop up boxes, taking a quick look to that it functions correctly will help the user experience and prevent people from moving quickly from your website.

Website designer Croydon

Smart Cow is a web design company in Croydon . We build bespoke websites for accountants and local businesses which are search engine optimised. We offer a free website audit which can highlight areas that need improvement and guide you on what to update.

We also provide a suite of digital marketing services including social media management, PPC, email marketing and ongoing SEO. Book a free consultation to discuss our website design services and online marketing.

Tips to improve website design

06/01/202105/19/2020 by scmarketing

Your website is the centre of your digital world. All digital marketing activity should be focussed on pushing traffic back to your website. Your web design therefore should be attractive to your target audience. The aim is to keep your visitors on your website for longer, providing them with the information you know they want to read about.

Improving your web design can help the user experience of your website and therefore in turn generate more quality leads as visitors sign up for newsletters, download ebooks and request a consultation. All this activity helps you to engage down the line with prospects that are interested to hear from you thus making this a successful inbound marketing strategy.

With this in mind, here’s some top tips to help you with your web design to encourage engagement from quality leads.

White space

Don’t just pack your website with reams information. Be selective, make every word count. Think of how you feel when bombarded with lots of content. It takes the appeal away of staying on the website and browsing further as you try desperately to take on board what it’s saying.

Think of how much calmer you feel when you see space around paragraphs and images. It keeps you focussed. The headings start to stand out along with the calls to action which are enticing you to do something.

Headlines that include keywords

As a website designer and content manager, you’ll often hear us talk about keywords to optimise your website. Your headings on your website are perhaps the most important places for your keywords.

By now you will have created your online buyer persona. In doing so you will know what your target audience is looking for. Therefore, this is the information you need to weave into your headlines. It’s not just about making the design of your headings stand out on the page, it’s also about the content.

If you need help with creating an online buyer persona, read our blog for more information.

Bold calls to action

A good Call to Action (CTA) helps a user navigate a website. Bold and clear actions will entice your visitors to stay on your site longer and ‘take action’.

Read our blog for further top tips for calls to actions.

Add bullet points

Your content should be tailored for your target audience. Provide them with answers to the challenges they’re facing. Make their experience of your website as personal as possible. Ensure your products and services answer their needs.

So why are we including content within web design? What’s key, once again, is making content easy to read. While you need to ensure you have all the vital information showing on the web page, the layout needs to be easy to read. Add bullet points and breakdown lengthy paragraphs. Separate with images to make it attractive. But don’t forget the all-important calls to actions. This is something that a web design agency can help you with at design stage.

Be consistent

Continue your website theme throughout the design of your website. All pages need to be consistent. Similar imagery, same font (size and style), colours and an easy to navigate menu. Visitors will warm to the consistency and it can help keep people on the site for longer as they easily search for what they need.

Web design Croydon

This had been a very quick overview of some of the key things to consider when embarking on a website design or redesign.

If you need help with updates for your website or require a new content managed (CMS) web design such as WordPress websites, then get in touch with us. We’re a WordPress design company in Croydon providing web design for accountants and businesses in the Croydon area and London as well as digital marketing services including Search Engine Optimisation for ongoing website optimisation to improve online presence and visibility in local search.

Once a web design proposal is agreed, we will work on the theme and provide you with a wireframe. This means you can see the look and feel of your new site in advance so that you can make tweaks before it is built.

Website design and development resources

Where can I find the best web designer in Croydon?

06/01/202102/27/2020 by scmarketing

Your website is your sales pitch to potential clients. The look and feel of your website are therefore vital to attract the target audience for your business. So, once you’ve ascertained that your website may need a little update, how should you go about finding a web design company in Croydon to help your business stand out in the online world?

Here’s our advice of what web design services you should cover off with your developer so that you can build a great website.

CMS

Build a bespoke website with a good Content Managed System (CMS). This means that once the website is built and with a little training, you can manage the upload of content yourself.

Easy navigation

Make sure the navigation and menu of your website are easy to read and navigate. Any page of importance should be no more than two clicks – preferably one click – from the homepage.

Using pillar pages will help you structure your site map. The titles of these pillar pages will also be the names of the URL. Really think about these as this is what you want to be found for. So, think carefully about your core offering so you can get this menu right at design stage.

Call to action buttons, strategically placed on pages will really help with engagement and your visitor’s movement around the website. As will white space. Don’t be too cluttered.

Content marketing

When you embark on creating your website it’s a great time to review your current collateral and what should be on the website and what shouldn’t. It can also highlight gaps that you need to fill. If you look at your competitors – how are they talking about their services? What’s missing from your website?

Optimise your website

Any agency you work with will tell you about Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags and H1/H2 headings. A web designer can provide you with simple training on this once your website has been developed. Or you can engage a digital marketing agency to manage this for you moving forward to improve your search results. This means they can keep an eye on your keywords for you. But this is for another blog. You can read more about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Be visual

Images must not only be relevant, in focus and look good, they must also be optimised for your wordpress website. A developer should be doing this for you when they upload the images. This means they are the right size for the website and will help with the site speed by not being too large. These will also help with viability when sharing on social media such as Facebook and twitter

Research indicates that marketers using video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users (Source: Wordstream). Video is therefore great for engagement. Placing video toward the top of a page, so that it is seen straight away, has been known to keep visitors on pages longer.

Back up your website

Most CMS provide modules to allow you to back up and to make safe against hackers. Unfortunately, with web robots (automated programs) checking thousands of websites a second for weaknesses to exploit the owner it’s important to do as much as you can to make it safe. Talk through the options with your web developer such as the SSL certificate and captcha forms for your website.

Get your website seen

This is just a short overview. If you’d like to chat about your current website if you’re looking to design and build a new one or generally about design services in Croydon, get in touch today and our website designer and developer can look at the best options for your business and how we would work closely to get the best results for your online presence.

Web Design Croydon

Smart Cow is a top online marketing and web design agency in Croydon that fully understands your requirements and provides user friendly websites and professional web design for accountants and local businesses at affordable prices.