You want visitors to your website. You plan a great digital marketing strategy aimed to get the right audience.
Yes, your digital marketing strategy has worked!
You have thousands of visitors to your website but no sales!
Why? Your website is a mess.
A flashy image greets them as soon as they land on your website. Visitors cannot navigate their way to the products they intend to buy. Each page loads so slow that the visitors leave the site, maybe, to never return.
Every visitor feels a ‘lack of connection’ when browsing through the website.
Where have you failed?
Your website design and development!
The website’s poor UI/UX is turning out to be a disaster and is negating all the hard efforts of digital marketing.
Good web design and development are essential in digital marketing.
Let us see how website design, precise digital marketing services, and development are crucial to the success of digital marketing.
Importance of website design and development in digital marketing-
Digital marketing or online marketing is business promotion using the internet and other digital means to connect the brand with potential customers.
You engage in various digital marketing techniques to get visitors to your website, make sales and grow your business.
Some of the digital marketing techniques are social media marketing, email marketing, SMS marketing and search engine marketing.
Some forms may not require a website. For example, you send an SMS to customers about offers in your physical store. Or, you send an email about a newly launched service and offer your business number for customers to contact you .
But most of the time, digital marketing involves getting customers to your website. When you choose the website as the destination of your digital marketing technique, web design and development become crucial. Because it determines if the visitor takes the next step of making a purchase from the website or not.
Digital Marketing → Visitors to your website → Browse products & buy it → Growth in sales
So essentially, even though your digital marketing is a success, it ultimately boils down to how effectively your website design and development persuades visitors to buy the products.
SEM
Nobody can dispute the power of search engines like Bing, Google or Yahoo.
People search for anything and everything on the internet through these search engines. So much so that the term ‘googled’ has been included in the modern dictionary!
One of the finest tools of digital marketing that uses the authority of search engines to get website visitors is Search Engine Marketing or SEM.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) comes into the picture when you want to rank your website through organic search and paid campaigns.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is of two types-
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- PPC (Pay Per Click)
PPC is the paid form of SEM while SEO is the organic form. Let us see how web design and development have an impact on SEO and PPC.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the technique of improving the visibility of your website in the search engine to achieve the highest possible ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Page Results).
And SEO is organic, which means, you are not paying to rank high.
The art of making your website rank high organically is achieved by improving your website’s overall performance.
SEO is of two types-
- Off Page SEO- This technique uses external factors like guest blogging, social media engagement, directory listing, creator outreach, etc to influence the website ranking.
- Onpage SEO- Here, the website’s individual pages are optimized for improving the website authority.
In onpage SEO, web design and development play an important role to build authority and improve the chances of ranking higher in the SERP.
Here are some of the ways your website design and development can be optimized for SEO-
- Fast loading- The practice of writing clean & scalable codes with redundant code elimination is followed to get fast loading websites.
- Website content optimization- The website content is designed around the user search intent. The meta tags, title, headings, URLs are optimized for search results.
- Image optimization- The image is optimized for its size and the alt text is included.
- Responsive website- The design interface on the website has to adjust itself to the user’s device screen be it the laptop, tablet or cell phones.
- Seamless navigation- The process and the page transition to and fro the home page has to be seamless.
- Security- The HTTPS protocol is preferred to keep the website free from malware.
- Backlinks- Earn maximum quality backlinks for your website.
Basically, the SEO effort in website design and development is to ensure that any website visitor finds it attractive enough to not only stay on it but also browse through the products and make a purchase. All along, the website UI/UX has to ensure that the users are satisfied and are able to find what they want in a hassle-free way!
When the search engine bots are satisfied with your onpage and offpage SEO efforts, they give a good rank to your website.
Meaning, the better your website’s user interface and user experience, the higher your chances of ranking.
So here, you are able to visualize the importance of web design and development in digital marketing and how it affects your business growth.
PPC
Brands bid for relevant high-volume keywords that are searched by users on search engines like Bing and Google. When any user searches for the keyword, the search engine places the brand ad on the search results page in any format as opted by the brand. This format of ad campaign is defined as Pay Per Click (PPC).
When a user clicks on any of your ad formats, they are redirected to your website homepage or any landing page specifically built for the ad campaign. So basically, your website is the final destination for any of the PPC campaigns.
You pay to get the right users to visit your website. But if the user does not find it worth their interest, they just leave the site.
So how do you ensure that visitors stay on your website?
- Offer a friendly user experience. Make sure it is easy for them to find what they want.
- Design a seamless intuitive navigation structure.
- Use the right color on the website and elements in it.
- Add attractive Call To Actions (CTAs).
- Make your website fast-loading and responsive to all devices.
- Use attractive themes and features like parallax designs, animations, videos, images and content.
No matter how good your digital marketing strategy is, if your website is not having a good UI/UX, you cannot expect conversions.
SMM
Social Media Marketing (SMM) is another form of digital marketing where brands leverage social media platforms to get visitors to their website.
Actively engaging the audience through posts (Facebook, Instagram), discussions (Twitter, LinkedIn), videos (YouTube, TikTok) or any other form drives brand awareness and gets the right visitors to your website.
From this point onwards, it is your website design and development efficiency that counts. It is the deciding factor that gets conversions.
Wrap Up
The website is your virtual brand identity. Digital marketing serves as a means of getting visitors to your website. A website perfect in UI and UX will allow your digital marketing strategies to be implemented effectively.
Before you start your digital marketing, ensure that your website design and development is optimized for conversions. It is the only way to get visitors, make sales, and grow profits for your business.
