8 Critical Elements a Website Homepage Must Have

A homepage is one of the most vital page of the website. Because it commonly gets the bulk of site traffic, it's crucial for the homepage to convert as much of that traffic into leads and sales. 

1) Attention Grabbing HEADLINE
Within 3 second, a website needs to answer, "WHAT DOES THIS SITE OFFERS?" Keep your headline title clear and simple to give the visitors clear picture of the same. It should neither be too long nor be too short and should offer a brief about the content. Heading should not be abstract as sometimes it can mislead the visitors.

2) SUB-HEADING
Your sub-headline should offer a brief description of what you do and offer. Avoid tacky language and messy text. It should provide the complete gist of the content that the user needs to know. Be different and show value. Don't just talk about yourself involve audience also. Also, use “call to action” so that there are more chances of creating a lead on the homepage itself.

3) BENEFITS
It's not only important to describe what you do, but why you do it matters. Prospects want to know about the benefits and advantages. Your potential clients will take a step ahead when they believe that your website also offer them benefits.

4) Clear CALL-to-ACTION
Including multiple call to action (CTA) above the fold is important to driving conversion. Offer two to three CTA (MAX) that map to various stages of the buying cycle. But do remember don't crowd the space with only “call to action”. Manage your space with your content, images and call to action(CTA).

5) Effective FEATURES
In addition to benefits, list some of your key features. This give people more understanding of what's provided by your product and services. This step will help you create a relationshipwith your potential customers by offering product and services along with beneficiaries.

6) CUSTOMER PROOF
Customer proof, is very powerful indicator of trust, which include just a few of your best QUOTES on the homepage. Adding a name and photo make the testimonials more real. Testimonial are a way to built trust among your potential customers who are in contstant search of reviews and then only they prefer the Website content. It helps you generate a positive reputation in the market.

7) User Friendly NAVIGATION
To decrease bounce rates, your visitors need a clear path into your site from the homepage. Make sure your navigation is visible at the top of the page. And be sure to keep it simple and clear so that it should be easier for the vitiors to locate the category pages, contact pages etc. If navigation links are not placed at proper postition, then the customers are likely to skip to another website shooting up the level of your bounce rate.

8) CONTENT OFFER
To generate even more leads from your homepage, feature a really great content and offer freebies and discounts such as a white paper, ebook or guide. This will make them feel wanted and create a great impression about your services.

Top 8 Reason Why You Should Invest In Mobile SEO

We're in a time when technological advances happen quickly in mobile website design, and new players are constantly being introduced. A mobile website design doesn't just look slick but also allows your site visitors to interact with your company no matter where they are and this will give you more opportunities to generate leads. A mobile website design is vital for capturing the maximum number of visitors and sales conversions for your website. Here are the top 8 reasons why you need to invest in a mobile website design:

1) The Era of Smartphones – Go Live!

More than 80% of all the internet users today are having smartphones stick to their pocket and they are ditching traditional home Internet altogether to rely only on their mobile device. If your site isn't built for mobile, you could be missing a massive portion of your market.

2) Unpleasant Mobile Experience – Your Lost Revenue & Potential Client

People are using their mobile devices more than ever. According to a Google survey, 52% of smartphone users said that an unpleasant mobile experience would make them less likely to engage with a company. 74% of visitors will return to websites that have a mobile-friendly design.

3) High Conversion Rates with Mobile Friendly Websites.

Even if the sale itself doesn't take place on a mobile device, that doesn't mean that isn't where the sales process began. 40% of users who research on a mobile device go on to complete their purchase on a desktop computer.

4) Improvise Google SERP Results

Google SERP now favors websites that have mobile responsive designs. You could be hurting your search engine ranking by not taking the right decision at right time. Responsive website is the need of the hour.

5) Social Media will Work Wonders

A growing majority of people use their phone to follow along with social media. This is a clear message that all the social media advertising needs to convert on mobile devices. If you're using social media to build your brand, your website needs to be built for mobile traffic.

6) Mobile Friendly Local Searches

Mobile sites can have geo-tagging to push notifications to people within your local marketplace as well as improve local search engine results.

7) Mobile Advertising Trends

Mobile advertising is an emerging market that is showing positive results. Mobile web design is relatively new, but it's here to stay. So all the future plans in regards to your Website must be responsive or mobile friendly.

8) Potential Customer Expectations

Customers will often look up products on their mobile device immediately -it's a fact that if people can't find your website in mobile search engine results, they aren’t likely to visit your site at all.

Mobile-friendly design is no longer optional. If your website is falling behind the curve, Picknbuilt can help bring you up to speed. Get in touch with one of our web strategists today and we'll help figure out a solution to design the mobile website your clients deserve. Not only this we are saviours of the tragic times and can lead you to the best position.

Top 5 Web Design tips to increase Web Traffic

Web design plays a vital role in how well a website ranks in search results on Google and other search engines. As a result, great Web design can create a dramatic effect on your business and how you make money online.

By implementing a few design improvements that leverage the latest Web technologies like CSS3, responsive Web design for mobile support, HTML5, and more you can derive potentially large gains for very little effort. However, if you are completely allergic to CSS and HTML, then you might want to get in touch with your Web designer and get them to make these design changes.

1. Supersede background images with CSS3 background gradients

Is your website still using background images? Images are large and chew the bandwidth slowing down your website. In almost all cases, background images can be replaced with modern looking, attractive, and lightweight CSS3 gradients. Head over to one of my favorite Web design tools, Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator. This will allow you to create cross-platform CSS using a graphical interface. All you need to do is copy and paste the new CSS code into your own style-sheets, and away you go.

2. Employ Images with text

Does your website use an image to display the site title? Do you use images to display written information? Not only are images large and unwieldy, but they also hide valuable SEO information from Google and other search engines. Using an image as header text is fine for a human, but not for the search engines because they can’t “read” images that contains important SEO keywords and phrases, and you’ll soon notice page rank improvements in the SERP.

3. Implement responsive Web design

Does your website support mobile devices? This is arguably the most important Web design update that all bloggers and businesses will have to do in the near future. Mobile access to the Internet will soon outpace PCs. This makes mobile Web design an imperative. There are several different methods you can use to implement responsive Web design for mobile support.

4. Replace JavaScript with CSS3 transitions

As a general rule, avoid using JavaScript if you can – it can hide important content from search engines, slow down your site, degrade badly, and generally lead to slow the user's browsing experiences.

But, JavaScript has been used to add cool, professional effects to websites for so long that many people don’t even consider what’s out there. It’s a pity because there are pretty amazing, super fast, super lightweight Web designs possible with CSS3 and HTML5.

5. Speed up your Website

Google takes page speed and performance seriously, and so should you. There are three ways you can speed up a Webpage:

1. Reduce the amount of time it takes to build a page on the server
2. Reduce the amount of data transferred from the server to the browser
3. Simplify the DOM (Document Object Model)

1. If you are using a PHP based CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla you might benefit from installing something like APC (Alternative PHP Cache) on your web-server that can help to speed up the actual PHP processing behind the scenes.

You might also look at ways to simplify your website so that there is less PHP or database queries to process. Caching is an important part of reducing server processing loads, and every website should utilize at least some sort of caching to speed things up.

2. You can reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred from the server to the browser using a number of techniques like:

• Compression, or gzipped transfer
• Reduce images
• Optimize images

3. Designers love using tools to design Web pages. Unfortunately, many of these tools don’t create HTML in a very efficient way. Often there are unnecessary containers, tables, boxes, etc.

Those are my top design tips to help drive traffic to your business website. What Web design tricks do you use to improve your page rankings and Web traffic? Do you think that Web design has helped your business succeed online?

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.

Why should you hire a Responsive Web Design Company

Nowadays the world is on the go and you can find Iternet in everyone's pocket. Gone are the days when it was necessary to be near your desktop or laptop to access the net. Nowadays nearly half the Google traffic is coming from mobile devices as more and more customers are using these devices to shop, browse and get in touch with brands. Therefore it becomes important that websites are so designed that the experience is equally good whether viewed on a computer screen or on any other device. This is where Responsive Website Design Companies step in. The websites designed by these companies will ensure that your website looks optimized irrespective of the viewing device or the screen shape and size.

Let us see why it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to Hire a Responsive Website Design Company:

1) Restructuring the size that fints in all devices

A website which is not using the Responsive Website Design technology will not look oprimized across all viewing devices. People are accessing your website not just from desktop and laptop computers but also from mobiles, SmartPhones, tablets, and what not. So it becomes vital to ensure that your website looks equally optimized across all screen sizes and shapes. And do remember that technology is advancing so rapidly that there will be more devices with different screen sizes in the near future.

2) Neccessary for Business

When your potential customers are viewing your website on the devices other than computers, and if it leads to a low quality viewing experience, the consequesnces affect their decision to get in touch with you or to buy your products. A responsive web design will ensure that the user experience remains same irrespective of the viewing device and the screen size.

3) Portraying a professional image

A smart sleek responsive website design for your website speaks volumes about your professional approach and outlook. Your company will be perceived as a tech savvy organization in tune with the times and efficient enough to give customers an optimal viewing experience.

4) Cost effecient and Hassle free:

The initial cost of a Responsive Web Design is somewhat more than a conventional website. But in the long run you will recover the initial cost layout as there will be no need to pay for separate website designs as a ‘desktop version’ and another as a ‘mobile version’. Naturally this will also mean less maintaining and updating separate versions of your company website.

5) Efficient & organic Google ranking:

Last but not the least Responsive Web Designs get higher rankings by Search engines like Google and Bing. Just as you can make websites on your own by using DIY options on the net, there also DIY options for making Responsive Web Designs. But just as in the former there is a vast difference between a DIY and a professionally done job. Therefore hiring a Responsive Website Design Company makes a lot of business sense both in terms of cost as well as impact.