Some people dedicate their time to pay-per-click campaigns, some to Facebook and Instagram posts, but many digital marketing experts make very compelling arguments that website design is the most important digital marketing practice you can do. Why? The short answer is SEO, and the long answer is a bit more complicated.
Why is SEO so Important?
SEO is the best way for a company to nurture its organic growth sustainably. When SEO is done properly, it is a very low-cost marketing strategy. That is because a lot of it is done at the website design stage, so it requires lower upkeep costs as long as you have a set website design strategy. When you are at the top of the SERP, your advantages over other websites are huge. Most people get the answer to their query in the first 3 pages that a search engine recommends.
Website Performance
The performance of your site is completely related to your website design and completely intertwined with your SEO. Good SEO in the modern-day isn’t about cheap techniques like keyword stuffing, it is about doing everything you can to add value to your website. You want to provide your visitors with an excellent experience, and website performance is a big part of that.
Site performance is essentially a measure of how well your site functions in the way that your visitors desire it to – if it is secure, if it is reliable (i.e. if you’ve chosen your servers and hosting packages well) and if it is fast.
Speed has a lot to do with technical website design – you need to be compressing your images and your code, you need to be clever with the functions you add to your site – too much going on will negatively impact loading speeds. If this is going over your head, Pronto Marketing does a good (and free) website performance and security review. A performance review is a good starting place because it shows you where you need to improve your site design.
Navigation
Navigation is an incredibly important but often neglected part of your website design. Big companies spend millions on optimizing their navigation because if the vast majority of your audience does not feel like they can use your website completely intuitively, they will just click away and go to another website.
Intuition is incredibly important in the digital environment. If a site doesn’tfeel right, visitors will simply go elsewhere and might never come back. That is one reason why navigation is incredibly important in SEO, as good navigation keeps visitors on the website and keeps them coming back for more.
Security
Designing your site with security in mind is essential. If you get hacked, it could very well end your website forever (or the business associated with it) due to extremely high costs of recovery.
Many small sites don’t design their site with security in mind and therefore become low-hanging fruits for hackers to exploit. Make sure you don’t do a shoddy job of anything that involves SQL, and make sure you design your site with encryption in mind.