Business Websites: The 3 Main Objectives
Attract Prospects
Use SEO and content to get found by your customers in search engines like Google and Bing
Demonstrate Value
Use quality design and branding to demonstrate authority and increase the perceived value of your products/services
Technical Proficiency
Enjoy a fast, easy to manage website solution that's customized to the specific needs of your business and industry
High Performance Web Development
Attract Prospects: The SEO Jump-Start
SEO has evolved rapidly over the past 4-6 years...
The SEO Jump-Start
Keyword Research
We determine the terms (i.e keywords) your prospects use in search engines.
Content Optimization
We optimize your website / content to show up in as many of those searches as possible.
Keywords: Open New Customer Streams
Finding Keyword Opportunities
1. Keyword Mining
- How do they search for your products/services?
- What information do they seek at different points in the sales cycle?
- What are the relevant questions they ask?
2. Keyword Analysis
3. Authority Clusters
Content Optimization: Your SEO Workhorse
Creating Masterful SEO Content
1. Generate Content Briefs
2. Niche SEO Copywriting
3. Final Optimization
Local SEO: Exert Your Influence
Exerting Your Zone of Influence
Citations database
Geo-identifiers
Content localization
Demonstrate Value: with Design, Branding, and CRO
Visual Messaging: Marketing to the subconscious
Web design is a potent form of digital marketing.
Attributes like value, quality, and positioning can be communicated visually – in an instant. Visual messaging is the art of communicating desirable traits about your business through design.
Humans process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
So instant judgements are made about your business based on your website’s design.
For the most part, these judgements bypass our critical faculties and occur without conscious awareness.
Design is a way to "brag" about your business in a way that might otherwise sound exaggerated if stated outright.
Integrated Branding: The Credibility Cloak
A strong brand identity is the instant acquisition of credibility and authority.
Unfortunately, most web developers think branding is just picking out some colours and a logo. This simplistic approaches to branding won’t bring you any added credibility.
We ensure your brand is intricately woven into your website in a way that is consistent, creative, and subtle. This perfectionism and attention-to-detail ensures the “feel” of your brand is continually evoked and strengthened.
Conversion Optimized Design
Every aspect of a business website should work synergistically towards one goal: bringing you customers. This means it must work seamlessly within your customer’s journey.
A “conversion” is when a website visitor takes a desired action like calling or making an appointment. A website should maximize every opportunity to convert potential clients into leads/customers.
The percentage of visitors that convert is known as the “conversion rate.” “Conversion rate optimization” (CRO) refers to the set of techniques we use to maximize the conversion rate.
The benefits of CRO cannot be overstated: A 1% point increases in conversion rate can have an outsized impact on your business’s bottom line.
An important way to increase conversions is to minimize the user’s effort / cognitive load: If navigating your website is an effortless and intuitive experience, visitors will be far more receptive to your marketing messages.
As a marketing-focused web design agency, we have a great deal of experience building landing pages and sales funnels. This work has allowed us to develop a potent arsenal of conversion optimization techniques, which we make sure to build into your website’s design.
Mobile Optimization
The Rise of Mobile
Mobile traffic has come to dominate the internet. In response to this, Google recently announced a shift towards “mobile first indexing.”
Put simply, this means your mobile website is indexed as your “main” website. So from both a traffic and SEO perspective, mobile design is critical.
You will hear many web developers bragging about building “responsive” websites. But all this means is that your site’s content ‘snaps’ to different sizes.
The Art of Responsive Design
Mobile Design vs. Desktop Design
Input Zones
Every time a user has to change their grip or switch to two handed use to take an action on your site, you increase the likelihood that they will leave.
Input Precision
It’s more difficult to take precise actions like selecting text fields on mobile.
Size and Distance
It’s easier to adjust your viewing distance on mobile – by simply moving your hand closer/farther – than it is to adjust zoom, which requires two fingers.
Pixel Density
Mobile screens have high pixel density and it’s easier for people to adjust viewing distance.
Technical Proficiency
Earlier this year, Google announced a major shake-up in the world of web development and SEO: a switch to what’s known as “core web vitals.”
Core web vitals are a set of metrics that Google now uses to directly influence your website’s SEO ranking. Core web vitals differ from traditional page speed metrics because they assess a user’s subjective experience of your website. So, nowadays, a website can’t just be fast – it has to feel fast.
As a result, a fast website is both a technical challenge AND a design challenge.
This switch to core web vitals followed another ground-breaking SEO announcement Google made a year earlier: a switch to “mobile-first indexing.” This switch, essentially, designated the mobile version of your website as the “main” version for SEO purposes. Combine mobile-first indexing with core web vitals and you now have a very challenging design environment for website developers.
Currently, very few websites meet Google’s core web vitals metrics on mobile.
We’re one of the few web design agencies that can meet Google’s “core web vital” metrics on both mobile and tablet. This is a great opportunity to put your website ahead of the pack and climb the SEO ladder.
Your website’s CMS is the platform it’s built on. Despite all the options, WordPress is the only reasonable choice of CMS platform: it powers 40% of the internet and its market share is still growing. It’s 27 times more popular than Squarespace and 33 times more likely to get organic traffic than a Wix website.
WordPress dominates because it’s an “open-source” platform. This has resulted in the proliferation of a vast marketplace of 3rd party themes, plugins, and add-ons. When using proprietary CMSs like Wix and Squarespace, you are tethered to only their solutions. This greatly restricts your website’s customizability and adaptability.
Search engines give a boost to content that is enriched with various types of media besides just text.
Here are some ways to enrich your content with media:
Images: take your own if you can, otherwise, use high quality stock images
Other Visuals: infographics, illustrations, diagrams, charts, slideshows, etc.
Video: explainer videos, doodle videos, animations
Overtime you will continue to build and expand on your digital presence. Starting off with some SEO is advisable. You may also dabble in some digital marketing by running Google, Facebook, or Twitter ads. Perhaps social media marketing is also in your future. Regardless of what you do, your website should be built ready to maximize all of your future efforts.
You will hear many web developers bragging about building you a “responsive website.” All a website has to do is have its content snap to different sizes, and it can be called “responsive.” Good responsiveness is far more than having snapping content. A number of fundamental design changes are needed as well because the way users navigate a website completely changes based on the device they’re using.
Your website should have all the basic modern security features:
Daily cloud backups
An SSL certificate
Antivirus protection
Firewall
Spam protection
Frequently Asked Questions
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