How Website Design Can Affect Traffic

Getting traffic to your website is important when you want to convert those visitors into paying customers. Even if you’re just running a website that’s fueled by ad revenue, you can greatly benefit by having a solid web design that encourages visitors to click your ads. This being the case, let’s go over several ways that website design can affect traffic both positively and negatively.

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” is when someone lands on your website and immediately clicks off. This is bad for business and even casual websites don’t want this to happen. There are a lot of reasons a bounce happens but typically it is because the page they land on doesn’t meet their expectations (such as in the case of a bait and switch) or because the website is ugly and looks difficult to navigate. This can be because of poor web design, but can also happen if a website isn’t designed to be mobile-friendly.

Web Design and SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is all about pleasing the search engine algorithms so that it ranks your website and its pages high in the search results. As you might imagine, this can have a massive effect on your traffic, good or bad. If your web design doesn’t conform to what is expected for on-page SEO, then you can expect your site to get buried in the search results.

The smart way to deal with this is by hiring a web design firm that understands SEO and digital marketing. They have a variety of website solutions that will optimize your SEO and ensure that it meets all the requirements to get your pages ranked high in the search engine results.

Social Sharing

These days there is a large focus on social media and for good reason. Most people come to the Internet to visit social media sites, not to go to a business website or a blog. This means that social media is the perfect way to funnel traffic to your website. However, the opposite is also true. By getting people who visit your site to share it with their friends, family, and followers on social media, you can greatly increase your traffic by getting new followers.

To make this work you need to take several factors into account. Firstly, it needs to be easy for people to share your site. Social share buttons are a good option in this case. You also want to give people a good reason to share. Sometimes a basic call to action asking for the share is enough, but in other circumstances, it can be beneficial to offer a reward for sharing your site. For example, if you have a membership program, you can give a bonus of some kind to people who get others to sign up.

Return Visitors

If you run a business website it can be easy to think that getting people on your site and making sales is the end all be all of your site’s purpose. However, don’t forget that getting existing customers to do business with you again is easier and cheaper than acquiring new customers. This being the case, having a web design that encourages repeat visitors to your site can be a big help in getting repeat business.

There are many ways to do this but one of the most common is having a blog that people will want to return to read. Other solutions include having a set of rotating deals or discounts that visitors can claim, or having data tracking that updates often, such as how precious metals sites will often track the value of gold, silver, and other precious metals.

More Traffic Means More Money

Traffic is the lifeblood of an online business and your website should be designed in a way to get as much of it flowing as possible. While this is especially true for business websites, even casual websites will have monthly fees to consider so they should be designed in a way that helps them to pay for their upkeep at the very least. Making sure your site is SEO optimized is the first and most basic step and from there you can focus on social shares, repeated visitors, and branding. Doing this will increase traffic and conversions as a whole.


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