Help your Small Business Grow by Avoiding these Web Design Pitfalls

At its most basic state, marketing is like a fishing line: it needs a means of attracting the subject (the worm or lure), and a way of keeping it on the line until you can reel it in (the hook). When it comes to online marketing, your website is your fishing rod, SEO can be your means of attracting your clients, and your web design is the hook. Knowing these important aspects could be the key to help you grow your business. To help you out, here are some potential threats that could lead to a faulty hook, allowing your potential customer to veer away into the depths of the market.

The Navigation Distress

Many businesses want to stay creative with their web design, so much so that they integrate features like unique navigation bars, unexpected link locations, or even unfamiliar icons. The thing is, your clients will want to find their way into your site and into the place they want to visit as quickly and efficiently as possible, so replacing your “home” icon from a house to a cow might be a bad idea.

The Signup Torture

Keep your signup forms simple, easy to fill out and as short as possible – the same goes for your contact form as well. As in almost everything about web design, simplicity is always king, so make sure that those who want to call you up won’t have to go through a complex process before they can get to you.

The Space Saver

Sure, it’s only reasonable that you should be concerned about maximizing content and eliminating needless space. However, you should know that at some point, filling your reader’s view with so much content in one page that there’s barely any room to breathe in between sentences can also be quite counter-productive. It might even keep your reader from appreciating the quality of the content written there.

You can quite efficiently get more customers to view your site if you practice efficient online marketing strategies. However, you can take this a step further by bolstering user experience through quality web design.

Can’t Get More Clients to Visit your Site? Double-Check your Content

Search engine optimization or SEO is a constant uphill struggle to build your site up to the peak (hopefully) of the search engine results page or SERP, where everyone who would look upon it could clearly see your brand and buy your products or services. Thanks to Google’s ever-improving algorithms, the best way to accomplish this is by getting more clients interested in looking up your site by providing them with quality and reader-friendly content – but are your readers actually finding your content, well, friendly?

Get to the point already

Imagine this: the bus seems to be taking too long to get to your stop, so you take out your iPhone and browse for a bit, and you come across an interesting blog about dog walking (and you happen to love dogs). Five paragraphs down, and the article is still to give any information about how to walk a dog – how would you react to it? If you’re the typical, busy human who’s always got somewhere to go, much like most of your clients, then you’d probably think about never visiting that blog again.

Blogs are not for stuffing

In the younger years of online marketing, it’s perfectly normal to come across websites with nothing but keywords crammed into the page like an unopened can of sardines. Today however, keyword-stuffed pages are frowned-upon and even outright banned from major search engines, and for good reason. Blogs and content are for reading, not for stuffing SEO stuff that your readers probably won’t even understand a word of.

In conclusion, reader-friendly SEO content means writing that your human readers and target audience can understand, appreciate and grasp in the short amount of time that they most likely have to read it. Sure, the rules regarding keyword research and optimization, link building, and other things that make SEO as successful as it is are still largely important, but it should never overpower the very message that your website itself wants to spread in the first place. This is how you should aim to get more customers with your online marketing efforts.

Fortune 500 Companies Get More Clients using Social Media Optimization

The biggest brands of today maintain their status with effective marketing. As multiple sources and experts agree, marketing using social media optimization or SMO reap powerful, ideal results. These three Fortune 500 companies are established businesses that dominantly benefit from the immense marketing capabilities of social media.

Facebook

Understandably, one of the biggest SMO platforms is among the largest gainers from SMO. Facebook garners and connects multimillion fans and followers across the globe. With these ever-expanding pool, they get more clients that are encouraged to patronize them or do business with them, such as games or application developers and advertisers.

Walt Disney

Across generations, Walt Disney has virtually become a permanent member of a majority of households. The young and young at heart are quite enthusiasts when it comes to social media. It's just sensible for this company to maximize their visibility and market their productions using SMO, and they are reaping substantial successes so far.

Starbucks

Aside from their trade mark merchandise, Starbucks has created an attractive online reputation. As their product is a necessity for a heftily-packed population, the company effectively pulls at coffee lovers' heartstrings. It helps that Starbucks customers themselves get more customers for the company by posting their photos of products and tagging their locations when they're currently at an outlet.

However established a company is, continuous marketing is key to sustain the business operations. Without keeping up with the trends and diversities of marketing, a business would simply fail in gaining profits. As the name of the brand fades into oblivion, customers would lose their interest in the company, or worse, not know them at all. Take the cue from these big names in their industries and start your inspired SMO campaigns today.