KISS
When it comes to your website, it’s easy to get carried away with the latest in trendy designs and endless content. But a good user experience really depends on an uncluttered, simple and easy to navigate website. Keeping your website clean and organized improves the customer experience and encourages them to spend longer on your website.
At Liverpool Web Design, we design websites with your customer at the front of our mind. We use a proven marketing strategy that highlights and showcases the best of your business directly to your customer. This strategy engages your customers by providing them with exactly the information that they are looking for.
Make it obvious
Your website is not just a pretty page. There is (or should be) a very clear action that your customers should take. Whatever the purpose of your website, get inside the head of your customer and think about where they would expect to find that information. Do you want your customers to call you? Make sure your contact details are easily identifiable and visible on every page. Do you want them to make a booking or request a quote online? Make sure you have clear and strong call to action buttons throughout your website linking to a contact form.
As web designers based in Liverpool, we live by the saying of “above the fold is gold”. This means that people don’t want to spend time scrolling to find information. We use best practices ensuring that all important information is displayed to your customers in places that they expect to find them so they can access this information quickly and easily. If you’re looking to increase conversions (or increase your phone calls) this is the first strategy you should be looking at.
The right pictures will do the heavy lifting for you
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The right image can greatly amplify your written content thus images should be chosen carefully. When selecting images, it is helpful to think about how you want your customer to feel about using your product and/or services. Obviously, you want your customers to have a good feeling about doing business with you. Using aspirational pictures can emotionally engage your customers and increase the desire to use your product and/or services.
Look at the two photos below. Which image is more appealing and makes you want to visit the dentist? The idea of having a beautiful smile or thinking about the discomfort associated with sitting in the chair? This is a classic example of how an aspirational photo can make an incredible difference to your customer’s experience.
When designing your small business website, Liverpool Web Design will do a deep dive on research. This includes researching both your customers and competitors to get a thorough understanding of what your customers are wanting from your business and what your competitors are offering to meet that need. We seek opportunities to highlight your business in a way that sets you not just apart, but also above your competitors.
Be honest and reliable
Potential customers come to your website to get information that is useful to them, whether it is research related to the products and/or services that you sell, or other educational content. The information you present should be relevant, correct and provide value to your customers. This is your opportunity to build trust with your customer, so it’s critical that the information is accurate. Trust can be easily broken through outdated product/service information, wrong numbers or just simple grammatical errors so it’s important to proofread each page before it goes life.
As small business website designers in Sydney (and a small business ourselves) we design your website from your customer’s point of view. During our free initial consultation we learn all about your target customers and will plan your website content and design to be truthful, engaging, relevant and helpful to your target audience. Our goal is to help you build relationships with your customers using an appealing website.
Utilise SEO best practices
SEO best practices ensure that your site is easily accessible and easy to find on the search engines. Studies show that 75% of users don’t look further than the first page of search results, so it’s imperative to use SEO in a way that places your website as high in search engine rankings as possible. With SEO, quality is more important than quantity as this leads to more efficient and longer lasting rankings. It’s rather obvious that you can’t expect to increase your business if your website is not visible. Some best practices to use include:
- Using social media to share your content and increase your website’s exposure
- Adding keywords to your website’s title tag, header tags and meta descriptions
- Creating high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience and rich with keywords and phrases
- Creating a blog and including more keywords in titles and posts
At Liverpool Web Design we are web designers that service all suburbs in Sydney. We understand how to use SEO practices to make your small business website stand out, regardless of where you are based. We can add geographic modifiers to your website, which is just a fancy way of saying we are telling the search engines to rank your site higher in specific geographic areas (suburbs). We use all the above listed best practices plus a few more tricks we have hidden up our sleeve.
Customer experience is king
The customer experience on your website incorporates many factors – speed, responsiveness, ease of navigation and social media integration – to name a few. A negative experience related to any of these factors will likely lead you to lose your customer to a competitor.
- Speed – if your website doesn’t load quickly, your customer will move on. Studies show you only have about 5 seconds for your website to load and impress your customer. Any longer and the first impression will be negative overall.
- Mobile Responsiveness – Adults spend more than 4 hours on their phones every day, and more than one-third do their shopping on their mobile. This means that if your website doesn’t load on mobiles, you are missing out on a big chunk of sales.
- Ease of Navigation – while there is no one-size fits all website, there are a few commonly accepted rules that place certain pieces of information in certain places. Your customers expect to find contact details or a shopping cart (if required) on the top right of your website. Menu bars should be uncluttered and concise and able to direct customers appropriately.
- Social Media Integration – This can help you improve your website’s traffic and engagement. By adding social media buttons to your website, you make it easy for visitors to share your content on their favourite social networks. Whenever there are any updates on your website, ensure the same updates occur across your social media.
The above factors all impact the customer experience which is captured by the search engines. Part of having your website rank high is based on algorithms used by search engines recording things such as: how long is a user on your site, how many pages are they visiting, how long are they on each page, how fast do they “bounce” off your website. Ensuring that the customer has a good user experience will increase positive rankings in these algorithms making your website easier to find.
When building your small business website, you should partner with a web designer who has experience with small businesses and understands how to make your website shine for your customers. As small business website designers in southwest Sydney, we apply all the above principles to ensure your website is fully functional and designed for a superior customer experience.
We will partner with you to create a high-quality website, designed to look modern and professional, while most importantly being an effective marketing tool for your business.
