When it comes to designing the perfect website for your business, there are so many different styles and directions in which your website can go: it can be anywhere from classy to minimalistic, from playful and vibrant, to sleek and modern.

While your chosen website look should exude your personal style, line of work, and brand identity, there are a few ground rules that are always applicable - no matter what style you decide to go with.

Great web design feeds into your user experience and functionality, while being easy to understand at first glance. Below we’ve gathered five simple website design tips to help make your site effective and compelling:

01. Keep your homepage minimalistic and free of clutter

Your website’s homepage should communicate your core message. Keep in mind, the less site visitors have to read, click on, or remember, the better they’ll be able to process and evaluate your content. By designing for decreasing attention spans and going for a modern website design, it’s more likely that users will do what you intend them to do. When it’s free of clutter, it’s much nicer on the eyes and easier to navigate. Remember to keep important content above the fold, space out your content, add imagery, and include a call-to-action.

02. Design with visual hierarchy in mind

Hierarchy is an important principle of design that helps display your content in a clear and effective manner. Through the correct use of hierarchy, you’ll be able to lead site visitors’ attention to certain page elements in order of priority, starting with the most significant piece.

The main components of visual hierarchy are:

1. Size and weight: Highlight your top assets, such as your business name and logo, by making them larger and more visually prominent.

2. Element placement: Use the right website layout to steer your visitors’ eyes in the right direction.

Once you establish a clear hierarchy for your information, readers can’t help but unconsciously follow the breadcrumbs you have left for them. Then, apply color, contrast, and spacing for further accentuation, remaining mindful of your brand identity.

03. Create easy to read website content

“Readability” measures how easy it is for people to recognize words, sentences, and phrases. When your site’s readability is high, users will be able to effortlessly scan, or skim-read, through it. This way, taking in the information becomes effortless. This is achievable by contrast, large font sizes, and font types.

04. Ensure your site is easy to navigate

You want your users to easily find what they’re looking for. In addition, a site with solid navigation helps search engines index your content while greatly improving the user experience. Ensure your site is easy to navigate by linking your logo to the homepage, having a clear menu, offering vertical navigation, and working on your footer.

05. Stay mobile friendly

All of your site visitors should be able to enjoy your professional website at its very best, no matter the device they’re browsing. Work on your site’s mobile version entirely apart from the desktop version. Remember to put yourself in the position of the user, and test out every page, user action, and button. Your mobile website should be even cleaner and less cluttered than your desktop version, so consider minimizing page elements and scaling down some assets, like the menu.

For more website design tips, visit our website at www.nickthemarketer.com. We offer website design Birmingham, AL services to people all over the US. We’d be happy to give you more tips or even take the task off your hands entirely. Shoot us a message and let’s talk!

SEO is crucial to the success of your business. The ultimate goal of SEO is to generate organic traffic from a search engine’s result page. This is important because it will make your website more visible – that means, more traffic and more opportunities to convert clicks into customers. Being a digital marketing Birmingham, AL agency, we wanted to create a resource that was super simple to help business owners understand the basics of SEO. Throughout this post, we answer the following questions:

What is SEO?

How does it work?

Why is it important?

What factors should I consider for my website’s SEO?

What is SEO?

If you don’t already know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing your website pages and content with the goal of appearing in the organic (unpaid) search results in search engines (such as Google, Bing, Safari, etc.) There are several different search engines, however, Google is by far the most popular with a whopping 90.46% of the search engine market share worldwide. So most of the time, when people are talking about SEO, it’s very likely they are talking about Google SEO.

How does it work?

SEO works by taking the search query that you enter into Google and delivering the most trusted results back to you within seconds. There are important factors to include on your website that will essentially help build this trust. These factors not only determine what results will come up, but also, what order they will come up. The goal is to get a ranking position of #1, but anything in the top #10 is fantastic.

Why is it important?

As content builds on your site, Google will start to place your website under more authority and will begin placing you higher for your particular search term. You can gain traffic from those who have never been exposed to your business before. Optimizing your SEO for your local city or area will help your website appear higher in the searches from people within the area. For example, we optimize our SEO at Nick the Marketer for our area by using keywords like “SEO Birmingham, AL.” Additionally, people that are searching through Google are most likely browsing for a particular product or service that they are looking to purchase. This is important for the success of your business because you want to be on the first page of that search engine when people in your area search for a keyword relating to what your business offers. The chances of people clicking on a website that appears on the second or third page are slim. Let’s be real – the chances of people even going to the second or third page are often slim.

What factors should I consider for my website’s SEO?

Google reportedly has over 200 factors that they take into account when delivering results to a certain search query. While they haven’t officially released an exact list of factors, there are many factors that have been proven to influence the results. Here are a few factors that you should know:

Your content should be great. It needs to be neatly presented, easy on the eyes, clear and coherent, easy to navigate, not too thin, and relevant to your website as a whole. If your website has too many conflicting topics, it will be harder for Google to figure out what you are about. If your content is just good, it may appear on the second or third page, and not the first. So make it great.

Do your keyword research. Know what keywords people search for that are relevant to your business. Do extensive research on the keywords you want to rank for. Take advantage of the keywords that are less difficult to rank for.

Make sure the site is well built. The information should be easy for the search engine to process. Use the correct heading tags, have clear categories, and submit a sitemap to your Google Search Console. This can be a bit more technical at times, so we suggest chatting with a web designer or hire Nick the Marketer as your SEO expert!

Have quality external links and backlinks. Link out reputable sources in your articles and Google will register that what you are saying is likely more credible. Just make sure you set any links to open in a new tab so you aren’t directing users to leave your own website. When someone links back to a page on your site, that is known as a backlink. When people link to your site, they are telling Google that they trust you.

Make sure the site is mobile optimized. Mobile optimized websites have a better chance at ranking higher because most people search through their cell phone. We suggest designing your mobile site completely independent of the desktop version.

Use multimedia. This is a great tool to drive more traffic to your website. Multimedia is proven to keep your audience engaged for longer periods of time. So use plenty of pictures, videos, podcasts, and more!

Engage your visitors. Pay attention to how much time users spend on your website. Google Analytics can track if they bounce right after clicking the page, or if they linger for 30 minutes. If Google sees that people are interested in your content, they will trust your content more.

Make sure your website loads quickly. Your site’s loading time is a major contribution to how high Google will rank your site. Ensure faster loading times by being careful about the images and videos you upload. Try to avoid uploading too many videos directly to the site – instead, upload them to YouTube and embed the link instead.

So, we will use our business, Nick the Marketer, for example. SEO Birmingham, AL and digital marketing Birmingham, AL are two keywords that we’re currently trying to rank for on Google. When we use these keywords in content like blog posts, articles, descriptions, and other content on our website, we are more likely to move up on those rankings. The goal is to rank in the top #10 (preferably first, of course) on every keyword relevant to your website!

Improving Your SEO and Digital Marketing can be complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. We believe in data-driven, mobile-first, and lead-generating marketing without the fluff or vanity metrics. Visit our website to learn more about how we can help you turn clicks into customers.