If you’re redesigning your website, it shouldn’t be all about the looks. Sure, it’s fun to revamp or breathe new life into an outdated site, but it also needs to be a functional platform your customers won’t have trouble finding or using. Your website is often a potential customer’s first glimpse into your business. That’s why it’s so important to make sure your online space is more than just visually appealing.
Don’t Sacrifice SEO
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the pursuit of increasing not only the quantity, but the quality of the traffic coming to your website. This is done through organic search engine results. Let’s further breakdown those 3 components we just mentioned:
- Quality: You want to attract people who are truly interested in purchasing your product or service.
- Quantity: After you attract the right audience, you are constantly trying to increase your customer base.
- Organic Results: While ads make up a large part of SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), organic traffic means you don’t have to pay for it and is driven by a number of factors.
Why is SEO important for a Website Redesign?
Search engines use crawlers to collect information they can find on the internet. All that info is used to build an index that is then fed through an algorithm that attempts to match the data to someone’s specific query. This results in what SERPs are shown to you. By optimizing the content on your site for these algorithms, you can ensure that your site will be seen by a potential consumer.
How do you make sure your new site is search engine optimized? Make sure each page of your site has titles and headers, appropriate metadata, images have alt text and you create a new sitemap for search engines. While these factors won’t affect the look and feel of your site, neglecting them could mean fewer people see your beautiful new pages.
Customers Need Good UX
User experience (UX) involves the process of creating a product that offers the appropriate experience to cater to your customers’ needs. Branding, usability, function and design are the main components involved in UX.
The term “user experience” is often confused with user interface (UI). However, they are not the same. User interface is about the look of a product, while UX encompasses the entire way a customer feels and interacts with it. In other words, if your site looks good, but is difficult to navigate and interact with, your audience probably won’t stay long, not return and possibly find a competitor’s site that offers a better UX.
Audiences have come to expect an optimized user experience. It's a basic indicator as to whether they’re going to choose your business to fulfill their needs. Studies have also shown that having effective design can sky-rocket your website’s conversion rates. Check out an earlier blogpost to learn why UX is so important to digital marketing.
Redesigning Your Website for Functionality, Not Just Aesthetics
Website functionality deals with the ease with which a visitor navigates your website and finds information. When considering functionality, it’s important to think about and define what the main purpose of your site is. Are you trying to sell products or services, provide information on a topic or issue, build brand recognition? Most likely, your purpose involves a bit of all three. However, if you can clearly define why your site exists, you are more likely to build it to function the way you and your potential customers need it to.
Brass tacks. If your website doesn’t have the correct functionality, your visitors won’t take the actions you want them to, whether that’s checking out, signing up for emails, or contacting you. Remember, all that glitters is not gold. If your website isn’t creating the response you want, despite how great it may look, it won’t do any good for your business’s growth and you’ve simply wound up spending a lot of money for a pretty, albeit dysfunctional, site.
Prioritize Redesigning Your Website for the Right Reasons
Redesigning your website with SEO, UX and functionality in mind seems like a lot to handle. It doesn’t have to be a daunting task with the right tools and experts. Learn more about ProFromGo custom website designs to see what services fit your website’s needs.
