Website design and marketing setup basics
Basics in understanding for website design with marketing in mind: Campaigning for truth: Growth hacking for success
In this section, we will discuss the following
Websites
Design Basics / Usability
Mobile Friendly
Keywords
Onsite Optimisation
Website Analytics
Websites and website design are ever-changing. Becoming more user-friendly, mobile-friendly, and intuitive to our wants and needs as consumers. There are clear leading players in the field such as Amazon, but we can’t all be Amazon, at least not yet, and most of us do not have our budget or resource.
So, what as a small or medium-sized business owner, indie publisher or campaigner can we do to ensure success in this field? How can we get a user-friendly website that doesn’t cost the earth?
Design Basics / Usability
Good website design cannot be understated. But good design without good usability is wasted. You can have the best-looking website on the internet but if it is hard to use then visitors will become frustrated and go elsewhere, and search engines will probably not rank it.
So, when planning a website, you need to first set out what your end goal is. What do you want the website to do? Obviously, the first thing that comes to most business owners’ minds is “make sales”. For an indie publisher, it’s to sell books, and as a campaigner, it is to get supporters for your cause, but you have to dig a little deeper than that. Yes, these are the ultimate goals, but maybe instead you might think well I need to engage people's interest and quickly.
Thanks to smartphones and tablets the average web user’s attention span have fallen from 12 seconds to eight, so research shows us, that some put it as low as four. Putting that into context you need to engage your audience quickly and easily. But don’t be fooled that is not all about a big visual impact.
A design that is too heavy on images and videos can cause, if not coded correctly, the website to load slowly meaning that four to eight-second attention span just got burnt and you lost them before they even landed eye or thumb on your site. In the same way, no visual content can make the website boring and less engaging.
You also have to plan for content depending upon the screen size it is going to appear on. Content viewed on a laptop or desk computer can easily navigate lots of small normal size font text, images, and videos but when you think about the same content view on a mobile phone it would be cumbersome, or from a smart TV, the text would be too small.
A lot of website design templates and content management systems can factor these elements in, and a good web design company should as standard advice on this and code your website to be responsive to not only the device but also the browser the website is viewed on.
One of the best pieces of advice for deciding on a website design and thinking about usability is to find a few websites you like ones you like using in a business or personal context. Try these out on several different devices and ask yourself what it is you like about these sites. If using a web design company then make this list of sites and reasons you like them available to them. If going it alone choose a website template or content management system/host that provides you with the flexibility to create a site similarly and try out various designs until you find one you like. Then test the hell out of it to make sure it is user-friendly and get your colleagues, customers, and friends to do the same also.
Mobile Friendly
In today's world, it should go without saying that if you have a website, it should be mobile-friendly. However, a lot of the sites I see are still terrible on a mobile device. Ensuring that your site is mobile-friendly is now probably one of the most crucial parts of your website design and usability.
90% of people searching and using the internet are now said to be doing so through a mobile device 90% of the time. Think about it this way; when was the last time you looked something up on the internet when you were sitting on your couch or out and about. That thought alone should tell you the need for websites to be mobile-friendly.
Over the last few years, this has become more important than ever. Google has forced this through its algorithm updates is now and has been for some time penalising websites that are not mobile-friendly in the search ranking.
On a side note, Google Adwords is now becoming more focused and emphasised mobile adverts. Primarily they are using mobile Google Ads to fill the search engine results so your adverts will need to be mobile-focused and the landing page and site mobile-friendly.
If you are creating a new website or having one created for you, then mobile optimisation and usability should now come as standard and should be relatively straightforward. If you have an existing site, then a migration to a new mobile-friendly platform or re-coding the current site may be possible.
Keyword analysis
What is keyword analysis and why is it important?
Well, quite simply it’s the analysis or keywords, well duh. But seriously if you remember previously, we talked about keywords or phrases, which are the words an internet surfer uses when looking for a product, service, or website in a search engine.
They type these keywords or phrases into the search box of the search engine, and the search engine spiders then crawl through their database and list all relevant websites in the most relevant order.
Keyword analysis can break down into two areas of concern for you the would-be internet marketer.
An analysis of the keywords or phrases that your potential customers may type in to find a website like yours.
An analysis of the keywords on your website and in the back end of your site to see how they relate to the keywords your potential customers will use.
Understanding this process and getting it right can be crucial to your website's success.
The first step in this is a simple research strategy whereby you look at the competition and the keywords that they are using or that they come up under and start making yourself a list.
There are keyword suggestion tools out on the web that can be quite useful in finding keywords to use. As well as keyword popularity tools that will tell you the most popular keywords used and the average search volumes there are for these each month.
Knowing the most popular search terms and words will tell you where you should be aiming your keywords. If your market is a particularly vibrant and competitive market, then you may look at the less obvious keywords or misspelled versions of those keywords that the bigger players may not have thought of to gain a market edge. Remember the internet is a fast-paced environment where the searcher does not always have time or worry about the correct spelling or search term.
If you are going to use a term that is less obvious try and think out of the box slightly, maybe you will use slang terms or specialist terms so that you stand out. Try and look out for where the competition has missed a trick.
Another good trick is to look at getting regional coverage first and national and international coverage second. By making your keyword phrases geographical you may find that you become the biggest player in your given area, and you may leapfrog some of the more established companies in the area.
There are no wrong or right keywords there are only keywords that relate to you. Try to keep the keywords related to your product or service if your site comes up under a search term that has nothing to do with what you have to offer the user will leave quicker than they arrived.
A keyword analysis is also a very important part of your AdWords or pay-per-click campaigns so bear this in mind when preparing a campaign. You can find very useful tools that will give you an idea of good and strong keywords to use both in your advertising and on your website. In Google Adwords, there is a very simple easy-to-use tool for this.
I will go much deeper into keyword analysis and optimisation in future articles as we move from the basics into the more advanced areas of digital and behavioural marketing.
In the next post/chapter I will start to look at the area of website keyword optimisation in more detail.
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