Improve your Website Design to Attract New Customers
Your website is the prime component of your online marketing. Therefore, the ultimate goal of web design is to attract new customers, keep their attention, and move them to act. This to true if you have a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) model or a Business-to-Business (B2B) model. How is your website performing?
There are many online articles discussing online marketing techniques and attracting prospects to your website. But what happens when your website visitors get there? Poor website design can diminish or negate all your hard work. If you have a high bounce rate, poor engagement, or a low conversion rate, consider these web design tips to attract new customers.
Pick a Consistent Color Scheme:
Your business communicates a lot at first glance, and it all hangs on the color scheme. Since colors evoke a message and emotion, it’s no surprise that banks typically favor blue (which emotes a feeling of security and trustworthiness), and companies that prioritize organic living and the environment opt for green logos (signifying growth, freshness, and health).
Specific statement colors not only speak to your business’ intended message, but also to the demographic you’re trying to attract. And when you’ve decided on a color scheme, make sure to use it consistently across all manner of branding, while scaling back on your general color palette.
Keep Upgrading Your Logo:
It has never been more important for your company to have a recognizable logo – after all, it’s not just an emblem on a card anymore. A logo appears on your website (both desktop and mobile), across your social media entities, as a favicon on a web browser, a mobile app tile on a smartphone, and more. When looking for a logo, try to make it as simple as possible and as unique as your brand.
Use Custom Photos And Visuals:
Innovative use of custom photos is the only way you can stand out in this competitive market. It is never a good idea to follow through with mediocrity, especially when it comes to aesthetic appeal, which decides the outset of your web page to your target audience
It may be easier to just skim through online stock photos and pick a relevant few to use for your website, but it will also make your site less innovative and less interesting. Creating your own concept of the kind of images you want and getting proper pictures taken for your site will make it more exclusive and make the idea you are trying to get across of your site more appealing and special.
Stay On Point:
The first thing a person visiting your site will notice is the top 1/3rd of your page, and hence that area must contain the most basic and essential information regarding your site. This includes what the site is about, how the customer can use the site to find or do what they came for. A smart layout will enable the users to find the options or information they are looking for more easily and will surely make the site more user-friendly. Avoid descriptions that are too long or convoluted. Everyone is looking for a fast and simple way of finding information, so unnecessarily long instructions or definitions will not be appreciated by anyone.
Designing That’s Responsive:
It is not wise to assume that your customers will only visit your site via a computer. With a single person surfing the internet through several devices, it is safe to assume your site may be visited by a phone or tablet. But for many websites, it is difficult to load the site when the user shifts to an Android/ iOS device, as the layout is solely made for entering the site through a computer browser. Making your site sensitive to changes in devices will ensure easier access for your customers, and so they will be less prone to not entering your site, even if they change devices.
Showcase indicators of Trust Prominently:
No company wants to give the impression that their services have never been used before, yet we’ve all seen websites that look hastily thrown together, untested, or sketchy. One way of strengthening your reputation is by showcasing appropriate accolades and other indicators of trust prominently on the homepage.
Has your startup been mentioned in the New York Times or reviewed on popular tech publications? Does your company have any well-known VC backers, or have they formed professional relationships with already established brands? This information, with appropriate links and graphics, should be incorporated.
Consider how Viewers read your Site:
Research from an eye-tracking study from the Nielsen Norman Group has shown that internet users are more likely to read content in an F pattern: first in a horizontal bar across the top of the page, and then horizontally again a little further down. Then they scan the document vertically from top to bottom. The implications are that visitors don’t necessarily read the whole document – they scan, and even then, mostly just the first two paragraphs on a page.
Applied to a business website, it may be more effective to communicate the most important information on the top third of a page, with generous use of keywords. Try to break up large chunks of text with appropriate graphics. I try to do the same thing in various columns I do here on Inc. Regardless of whether or not this model works for your company, it’s increasingly important to consider how viewers read your site.
Keep it Simple!
It’s easy to get carried away by all of the elements that everyone says you need. However, even with today’s surplus of SEO features and custom design elements, it’s never been more important to scale back, get rid of all non-essential details, and keep it simple.
On a practical level, people aren’t just finding your company on a computer anymore. Screens are getting smaller, which means all-important information needs to be featured more prominently. They also have shorter attention spans. People are scrolling faster, so if they don’t find what they need at first glance, they’ll look elsewhere. As we’ve learned from Apple, simple is beautiful. So if you’re building a new website, or simply updating an old one, just remember: keep it simple.
Conclusion:
These are a few simple tips you can cater to your use when designing a website. Of course, if you find implementing these tips a bit too intimidating to do it yourself, we are providing web design services. At the end of the day, all you will need is some creative thinking and a knack for perfection.
Social Media Marketing Tips to Improve Your Small Businesses
Social media isn’t just for personal use anymore. Businesses small and large have been using platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for years – to the benefit of their bottom lines. And, if your business is struggling to make an impact, it’s time to make a change.
With 70 percent of the US population claiming at least one social media account, lagging behind on social media is no longer an option if you want to grow as a business. However, constantly changing algorithms and increasingly savvy competitors admittedly make it hard to find your audience, particularly without a little advice.
Here are some stats to help you understand the importance of social media marketing for small business and why you need to take it seriously.
1. According to a survey conducted by eMarketer, 88% of businesses use social media.
2. 96% of the people who talk about your brand online aren’t following you on social media.
3. Customers spend 20% to 40% more on products/services by companies who engage with them on social media.
Being a small business owner, you should see social media as a robust tool that can help build strong awareness, increase the number of sales and build a real customer base. When you truly understand the potential of social media marketing for small business, you will see that the results that you achieve are far better.
That’s why getting a few tips from experts can do wonders for your next campaign. Take a look at what we found to be the most helpful social media tips out there today and reach your audience.
Get Started:
If your business doesn’t have a social media presence by now, you’re possibly feeling apprehensive about jumping in this late in the game. With more 60 million business pages on alone, making an account now might seem like a pretty daunting task. However, in 2018, it’s more about “now” than it is about “perfect.”
“Don’t be afraid to just get started — walks you through the steps and provides additional help resources so you don’t have to have every little detail set up perfectly. Just get going and learn as you go,” said Sandi Krakowski, serial entrepreneur and active social media user, to Business.
Social Media platforms like are designed to be updated as you go. There’s no reason to be worried about creating a “public relations disaster” because you poorly punctuated your “About” section. Get your company on now, and figure it out along the way. You’ll get the hang of it.
Commit to a Plan:
When it comes to social media marketing for small business, having a strong and clear strategy is the first step towards finding success. There are many reasons why a business may fail to get results with social media marketing, but sometimes it is only because they did not know what they were doing.
“It all starts with planning,” wrote Brian Peters of Buffer. “Create a social media strategy and write it down in order to hold your business accounts. Your strategy should include a basic company mission statement, content plan and goals. And most importantly, a powerful statement on ‘why’ people would follow you on social media, what kind of content you plan on creating and posting, and what you hope to achieve.”
For instance, if you are marketing on Facebook, you should not only focus on getting more likes to your posts and your page but also try to boost the number of leads and sales you’re getting. Try to align your social media goals to your business goals.
Audit Your Social Media Online Presence:
If you’re looking to improve an existing social media presence, it’s essential to first take stock of what you’re working. And that means, it’s time for an audit. By inspecting your current audience, content, and overall social media strategy, you can learn a lot about what customers want from your business.
So how do you conduct a social media audit? Taking simple steps, Gather Data, Ask some key questions, Look at your audience, Determine top performing post, Do brand check, compare to competitors, reviewing your content, and Compare to revenue, leads & conversion target, will make a huge difference when it comes to your future social media success.
Create a Social Media Calendar:
Creating quality social media content is not enough. You also need to make sure that it reaches your followers on a consistent basis. An effective way to share the right kind of content is to use a social media calendar. Without complicating things, a social media calendar is nothing but a detailed schedule of the type of content you will be posting to each of your social media accounts. It gives you the much-needed clarity to post social media updates that matter.
There are multiple ways to create your social media calendar. You can either choose to go the simple way by using a spreadsheet or calendar in your Google Drive or use a more robust approach by using a paid tool.
It doesn’t matter what tool you use to create your calendar, what actually matters is how detailed it is and how you will be executing it. Because ultimately your precise execution plays a major role in making your efforts successful.
Having a clear social media calendar allows you to stay accountable, be consistent, save a ton of time, get more productive, and achieve peace of mind – all of which contributes to building a result oriented social media marketing approach.
Get Inspired by Other Brands:
When you are doing social media marketing for small business, it is easy to get confused and misunderstand what your audience is looking for. This can lead you to create content that does not go well with your overall business goals. Which is why you need to spend time looking and analyzing the type of content other businesses are posting to their social media accounts.
These companies can be your direct competitors or may even compliment your business. The idea is to get a clear understanding of the type of content that is working for them. Look for patterns and see what’s fetching them the most social response.
You can also leverage social listening to find insights about your prospects and what they want to see from you. This not only ensures that you create appropriate content on a regular basis, but it also helps you stand out from the crowd.
When seeking inspiration, it is not necessary that you only stick to analyzing other small businesses using social media marketing. You can also go beyond and actually learn from industry leaders and bigger brands such as Starbucks, Oreo, Netflix, Apple, etc. It allows you to grab some real social media social lessons firsthand.
Don’t Forget Video:
As technology has improved, the video has become incredibly popular on social media. From live feeds to GIFs, the medium has become the go-to method for marketers to get the attention of potential customers. And, suffice it to say, it’s working.
“The domination of video has been a long time coming,” wrote Brent Barnhart of Sprout Social. “Eye-catching, entertaining and capable of stopping scrolling users in their tracks, video represents the ideal way to encourage fans to spend more time engaging with your brand.”
The stats back this up, too:
If you haven’t been convinced that video needs to be part of your social media strategy to date, it’s time to rethink your approach.
Choose the Right Platform:
One of the things that can impact your social media marketing for small business results is the choice of your platform. In order to get the most out of social media marketing for small business and make your brand stand out from the rest, it is crucial that you choose a platform that is suitable to your business goals. If not, you may end up spending your time and money on a social network that will most likely not give you a favorable return on investment.
Do not make the mistake of selecting a social media platform based on a wild estimate or on what others are doing. It is important that you take into consideration your target audience, their preferences, and other demographics before starting to work with a platform.
Develop Separate Personas:
Once you have the minute details that you find common between the best customers, it’s time to organize them into different personas, which helps you target with more precision when using social media marketing for small business.
You can easily do this by creating a list of customers within your audience that share the same kind of goals and face similar challenges. Create separate groups out of these customers and categorize them. Each category you add is nothing but a unique persona that you will be leveraging later on.
For instance, if you are a yoga teacher, some of your students may want to do yoga to perfect their posture while others may aim to do it for building muscle strength. While both of these customers want to do yoga, but for different reasons or goals. Which is why it makes sense to create two different personas for them.
Conclusion:
The reality is that, even with all the social media tips in the world, it still takes a lot of time, energy, and resources to get right. Even then, there is no guarantee you’ll be able to foster success through social media, particularly without help from an Expert. That’s where a We can do wonders.
You won’t need social media tips, because these services are set up by experts who can do the hard work for you. We improve your social strategy with the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision, so you can reach new customers while keeping your current customers happier than ever.
Drupal SEO: 13 Things that Will help to Improve Your Site’s Ranking
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) might not be the first thing you think of when designing a new website, but building an optimized framework from the start will help you drive traffic to your site and keep it there.
With our Drupal SEO checklist in hand, you can build an excellent website that draws customers from launch day. Briefly speaking, here is a bullet list of what to check before the launch day. Below, we’ll speak at each point in more detail.
- Check that all web pages have unique titles using the Page Title module
- Check if the XML Sitemap and Google News Sitemap are configured properly
- Check if the Redirect module is enabled and configured
- Check if the Global Redirect module is enabled and configured
- Check that .htaccess redirects to the site with/without www
- Check that the homepage title includes a slogan and is descriptive of the function of the site
- Check if the Meta Tags are filled with descriptive information
- Check that OG tags are filled correctly and with descriptive information.
- Check if the site’s information appears well when shared on Facebook
- Check if Path aliases patterns are meaningful
- Check if Google Analytics is enabled and configured
- Check if Site verification is enabled and configured
- Check if the Search 404 module is enabled and configured
- Check that all web pages have Unique Titles:
All of your pages should be easily identifiable to the end user. Not only should they have unique titles, but they should also have meaningful titles.
Having multiple pages with the same titles (like “Get in touch”, “Contact us” and “Make a booking”) will simply confuse your end users and search engine crawlers.
Not only do good page titles help customers who are already on your site, but they help with social sharing, and picking your site out of search engine results.
Titles are the first element that any user will see, whether they come directly to your site, find it in a search engine, or see it shared on social media.
Writing good titles is extremely important, and having keywords in your title that match a user’s search greatly improves the chances of them clicking on your page.
Ensuring all your pages have a unique name will help users navigate, boost your SEO ratings, and increase the chances that someone will type the right keywords into a search engine to bring them to your site.
You can set up unique page titles much more easily if you install the Drupal Page Title module.
- Check if the XML Sitemap and Google News Sitemap are configured properly:
The XML Sitemap module creates a robot-friendly map of your site that Google and other search engines can crawl to categorize your website.
There are a few settings you can alter your site at admin/config/search/XML sitemap and you can view the sitemap from yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
You should configure XML Sitemap early in your site build for the best effect, but you can also alter the settings later on if needed.
Google News Sitemap offers a similar but different service that creates a Google-specific map – as suggested in the name. These two modules work nicely side by side to make your site easy for search engines to crawl and index.
- Check if the Redirect module is enabled and configured:
Redirect is a handy module for making sure users always make it to your site. It uses case-insensitive matching to help catch broken links with redirects and tracks how often users are hitting those redirects.
You can use redirects to capture any broken links, set up promotional links, or simply capture typos users are entering when trying to access your site.
- Check if the Global Redirect module is enabled and configured:
If you’re using Drupal 8, you can skip this one because the functionality has been rolled into the redirect module. Otherwise, install Global Redirect to work in tandem with Redirect to catch any broken links.
Global Redirect will test all links with and without a trailing slash, ensure links are case-insensitive, and if a link is truly broken, it will return a user to your home page, rather than an ugly 404 page that decreases the position of your site in SERPs.
- Check that .htaccess redirects to the site with/without www:
Some users attempting to visit your site will navigate to yoursite.com, while others will simply type yoursite.com. By setting up your site to handle either request, you can be sure you won’t miss any visitors.
- Check that the homepage title includes a headline, logo, and primary image, and is descriptive for the function of the site:
The headline, as well as the slogan, represent who you are as a business. Make your first impression a good one as this will also be visible on search engines.
This is a good opportunity to stack your website with SEO friendly keywords, but don’t go overboard and sacrifice your image for it – keyword stuffing may not only decrease the trust index of your site but also its conversion rates.
- Ensure Meta tags are filled with descriptive information:
Writing SEO-optimized metatags is highly important because they remain one of the top on-page ranking factors. Make sure to install the Metatag module on your site to have an easy, user-friendly interface for updating metadata.
With the module installed, you can easily populate metadata with keywords, page descriptions, and more.
The Meta tag module will also give you extra control over how your site appears when shared on Twitter or Facebook.
- Check that OG tags are filled correctly and with descriptive information:
OG tags are meta tags specifically designed to ensure your site communicates nicely with Facebook. By setting these tags correctly, you will be able to control exactly how your site appears on Facebook, including what images and what taglines are used.
- Check if the site’s information appears well when shared on Facebook and Twitter:
After configuring the metatag module and OG tags, pop over to Facebook and make sure that your site shares the way you would like it too. It’s important to test this out now before users start sharing your site around.
Similarly, try tweeting a couple of your pages to see how well your Twitter Cards come through. If you don’t want to show your site to your audience until you are sure it is set up properly, you can check Twitter Cards using the Card Validator.
For more information on configuring Twitter cards, check out the Twitter user guides.
- Check if Path aliases patterns are meaningful:
By default, Drupal will set your URLs to node/123 – while this works great for the database backend, it doesn’t work well for your end users, or for search engines.
You can use the Pathauto module to create rules and patterns for your URLs that will significantly cut down on your maintenance times and simplify your site navigation.
- Check if Google Analytics is enabled and configured:
While having Google Analytics configured won’t improve your SEO, it will give you all the data you need to understand where your users are coming from and how they behave once they hit your site.
Installing the Google Analytics module makes setting up and configuring Google Analytics a breeze.
- Check if Site verification is enabled and configured:
The Site verification module makes it easy to check the boxes that tell search engines that your site is truly yours.
Having your site verified will improve how search engines crawl your site, and for Google will allow you to access private search data. With site verification, you will receive better data and better search engine rankings for just a few minutes work.
- Check if the Search 404 module is enabled and configured:
The Search 404 module is a saving grace for reducing your bounce rate, your SEO and improving your customer experience. Instead of your users finding an ‘Error: Page not Found” in place of the content they were hoping for, they will be offered a search of your site based on the URL string.
For example, if “yoursite.com/great-seo-tips” doesn’t exist, use this module will automatically search your site for ‘Great SEO tips” and show the users the results.
Bottom line:
While SEO may seem like a tricky subject to wrap your head around, the basics are easy with the right modules and the right guidance. Drupal is a great content management system for building search engine optimized websites.
With our On page SEO checklist, Drupal SEO checklist and most common SEO mistake. you can get off on the right foot, and here at Verdot, we love educating our customers to build top quality websites. If you’re looking for even more ways to improve your sites SEO, get in touch with us.
