5 Reasons To Redesign Your Company Website In 2016

While the engagement you garner on your Website is directly proportional to the amount of sales and leads you will generate but id your basic functionality and core design elements are not not up to the mark you won't be able to retain your regular clients let alone the prospective ones. To maintain your online presence on the vast World Wide Web it has become mandatory to adapt the technological advancement and stay relevant with market ventures. Whether you want a lower bounce rate, to keep users on your site longer, or simply wish to increase your conversion rate, you should be evaluating your website performance on a regular basis to discover areas for improvement.

Contemplating whether your website needs a redesign? Consider the following reasons why it might be time to take action and revamp your digital presence:

Saturated Homepage

The biggest mistake is inundating the user with an excessive amount of content right on the homepage of your site. You have only a few seconds to capture the interest of a website visitor, so you must be concise and to the point with the content you supply on your homepage. Ultimately, your homepage should express your core value proposition and true differentiator in the marketplace.

Arduous Contact Information

If you’re a B2B service provider, or if you’re a luxury ecommerce site, your contact information should be on your website. If you don’t include it, you will undoubtedly see more users dropping off your site, and your bounce-rate will shoot the sky as a consequence. With so many users on their mobile devices, they may quickly be looking for a way to reach you while they’re on-the-go, and if they’re unable to find your phone number, they’ll find an alternative company that is easier to get in touch with. Aside from catering to users on mobile, including your phone number builds trust with your consumers. Potential customers feel more comfortable when there is a way for them to reach you, ask questions before making a purchase, or speak to a customer service representative about a product they’re interested in.

Responsive Website – Need of the Hour

Keep in mind most visitors coming to your site for the first time are on their mobile devices. Looking into future, this isn’t going to change. In fact, the number of mobile devices users as opposed to desktops will only increase in years to come. A responsive design allows you to accommodate all of your users regardless of the platform they are using. This sort of website design provides customers with a great user-experience whether they are coming from mobile, table, or desktop. Simply put, if your website isn’t responsive, your competitors already have an advantage over you—so it’s time to implement a responsive design now. 

 

Website Redesigns: A Worthwhile Investment

Redesigning your website is one of the most powerful things you can do for your company online. At its core, a website is a communication tool. If it’s difficult for users to communicate with your brand digitally, you’re going to lose sales. By following best practices and using a strategic approach to website design, you can help your company garner an improved ROI and increased brand visibility.

Local SEO Trends 2016

Local search engine optimization (SEO) can be tricky. Not only do you have to do all the customary SEO stuff, but then you have to do a new layer of complex SEO activities. Most tech-savvy local-business owners have a decent idea of how to do local SEO, but diving to a deeper level can get confusing.
You have to make sure that you’re getting listed with the right local directories. Also, you have to know how and where to find the local directories that are unique to your geographical area. Plus, you have to ensure that you are optimizing for your geospecific hyperlocal neighborhood, not just the general location of your business.
In order to address some of these major issues, I’ve explained the top five things that most people forget about local SEO. If you want local search traffic, you need to make sure that you go through each of the five issues in this article.

Online Listing – Accuracy & Consistency

The most important component of local SEO is a trinity of information known as the NAP. NAP stands for Name, Address and Phone number. Some people call it the NAP+W, adding in the Website for good measure.
The No. 1 negative local ranking factor, according to Moz, is a “listing detected at false business location.” The third biggest negative ranking factor is a mismatched NAP. Inaccuracies like these will kill your local SEO.
Clearly, small and local businesses are facing a severe challenge when it comes to getting local listings. Let me break this down into two specific areas -- accuracy and consistency, and why they matter so much.

Accuracy of NAP

Local search engines use the NAP as a measuring stick of accuracy for a business’s existence. In order for the local search engine or directory to validate the presence of your local business, it must make sure that every point of data aligns perfectly.
In order for a business to be legitimate, it has to have all three of these pieces of information -- name, address, and phone --and they all have to correspond in every citation across the local landscape.

Consistency of NAP

The other issue to keep in mind is consistency.The NAP must be consistent across all the local directories, mentions, citations, and listings.
Consistent NAP information is essential to getting more citations and improving search engine rankings.
The information on Yelp must be consistent with the information on Google+, which must be consistent with the information on Foursquare, which must be consistent with the Local Small Business Association, and on and on.
All of local SEO begins here -- with the obvious NAP. But it goes further, with the not-so-obvious issues of accuracy and consistency.

Online Listing – Detailed Information

It’s easy to get listed in local directories. It’s noteasy to fill out these local directories to their maximum potential.
Creating a local listing is time-consuming and tedious. But that’s exactly what a local business must do if it wants to rank. This is where we get into one of the often-overlooked features of local SEO. These directories should be filled out with as much information as possible.
This leads me to the point that many businesses miss: Your customers are using your place page or social-media page as your de facto website.
Where did all that information come from? It did not come from the website, because this particular establishment doesn’t even have a complete website. All they have is locally-optimized accounts on every meaningful local listing.
With the recent rollout of the new Google My Business platform, local search experts are insisting more loudly than ever that it’s important to fill out all your information as completely as possible.

Grab your reviews

The good thing about local search is that it’s mostly under your control.
You create your local listings, optimize your Google My Business page, pimp out your Facebook account and do all the other things that bump you to the top of local search results.
There is one thing that you can’t completely control. Reviews. You can’t force users to post their review on Foursquare or Yelp or give you a five-star rating on Google+. But you can encourage them to do it.
There are plenty of ways to motivate users to give reviews. In exchange, you can provide them with free drinks, a shout-out on Facebook, discounts, props -- whatever. At the very least remind them to leave a review. Post a sign on the counter or the door so they can leave a review.
Reviews are so essential for local search optimization that it’s worth it to go the extra effort and ask for these things. Google consistently delivers local results that favor establishments with higher reviews.

Hyperlocal SEO

Local neighborhoods are hard to fit into a search engine algorithm. They lack boundaries and clearly-defined names. Thus, the moniker “informal space” has come to characterize regions. Locals may call an area something different from what appears on a formal map. It can be tricky to rank for local SEO in a neighborhood that has a name different from its official map designation.
By optimizing your company website with neighborhood terminology, you can make strides in local searches that target the informal space of your neighborhood while also ranking in the official algorithm-selected region.
There are things that you can do to optimize your business for the possible neighborhood algorithm from a strictly local optimization perspective.

• Add your neighborhood name as a descriptor at the end of your business name on your Google My Business page.
  
• Add your neighborhood name to the description on your Google My Business page.
  
• Add your neighborhood name in text to your website (if you have one).
  
• Add your neighborhood name to title tags on your website.
  
• Make sure Google Maps has your neighborhood defined correctly. If not, go into Google MapMaker and submit an update.
  
• Add your neighborhood to all of your local citation profiles.
  

All the conventional SEO techniques and enhancements receive a complete makeover when viewed in the light of local SEO. A local business depends on local SEO.
As part of the CTA on my personal website, I use a local-specific subheading. Every user that visits my page will see a message that is customized to their specific geographic region. When I implemented this feature, my conversions shot up. This tells me that local-business owners want to be successful in their geographicarea. The only way to achieve this kind of success is through good local SEO.

How to improve your E- commerce Website Conversion Rates

Conversion rate optimization is a mandatory procedure for companies that aim to be the best player in their industry and wish to stand out from the over crowded eCommerce market. Even though we first heard of conversion rate optimization back in 2007, it’s benefits only became popular since the last three years. It’s a digital marketing trend that will certainly be on the “what’s hot?” list for the next year: early adaptors will be ahead of their competitors, building their reputation as leaders and as a top of mind choice, while those who lag behind will lose the chance to innovate their business.

As studies have shown, only 22% of businesses are satisfied with their current conversion rate. So there is plenty unexploited territory and many ways to get the attention of your website’s visitors: 78% of companies are not reaching their true potential and aren’t happy with their conversion rate.

So, the question is what can you do to upgrade your business to the next level and be recognized as top eCommerce website?

                     

Align Conversion plan with Business plan

Considering that CRO is an important part of the digital marketing strategy, marketers are still not getting the results they want. This might be a direct consequence of not implementing an integrated conversion rate optimization plan.

Start with the end in mind: what’s the purpose of this eCommerce business? What are my goals? How can I reach these goals? Once you have the answer to these question, you can drive up a marketing plan and include in it the conversion rate optimization plan.

Make the Check Out More Visual

You want to make your eCommerce application visual and easy for a user to understand. If a user does not know how far they are along the check out they may get frustrated and abandon your site for another with a simpler checkout path.

Incorporating Video

Sometimes when consumers are exploring eCommerce web applications they want more than just a picture of what they are buying. Utilizing a video of your product or service can reassure your visitors of what you are delivering. Video also conveys a better image of your company while helping to build trust and create a professional image for your brand. Remember, when adding video or images to your application always keep in mind page load time

Optimizing for Mobile

In today’s market, if you are not optimized for mobile, you might as well call it quits right now. Custora said “one third of all eCommerce purchases were made on a smartphone during the 2013 holiday shopping season”. That estimate has gotten larger over the past two years. It has become easier for page visitors to make their purchases via mobile or tablet. If your application is not optimized for mobile your visitors will seek their products or services elsewhere.

Increase Your Application Speed

Application speed may not be as important as providing an incredible user experience, but you do not want to keep your customers waiting around forever for your checkout page to load. There are many different techniques for identifying and fixing problems that may cause slow application speed.

Using Free & Fast Shipping

One of the first things a customer considers when they visit an online retail application is whether or not they offer free shipping. For many, no free shipping equals no purchase. Retailers need to be aware of this in order to be competitive with other online retailers.” If you do not jump on the idea of free and fast shipping someone else will. When that other web application uses it that is where your shoppers are going to go.

Using any one of these tips and tricks will improve your eCommerce conversion rate. Take your time and experiment with these different solutions to improve your website. If you are still looking for some more tips on what you can do to get more visitors you can check out our website Picknbuilt, leading website design & development company.