Search Engine Ready Website Design for Your Small Business
We are a website design company serving businesses in Maryland and several states across the country. Our main clients are local mom and pop shops but we also provide services for larger businesses, including franchisee websites. Our main focus in our designs is building quality websites that meet Google Search Essentials. Because we believe so strongly in the power of SEO, we only take on web design or website redesign projects where the client wants to harness the power of search engine optimization. If you’re simply looking for a business website that acts as a business card rather than a powerful marketing tool, you may want to hire someone else. We believe a website design’s purpose should be to bring your company new business and not be for the purpose of an award-winning design. We build attractive websites that are fast- loading, user-friendly, and SEO ready.
Call 410-420-9390 or use the contact form to get a web design quote.
Implementing SEO Into Your Website Design
In many cases, companies hire us first to help with their SEO then realize their previously built website no longer meets current SEO standards. After several months on our local SEO program and seeing progress, they eventually have us design their next website. We build web sites for the main purpose of getting ranked high on search engines.
SEO Content Writing Services
While there are many technical things we will do behind the scenes to optimize your website for the search engines, your web content is crucial for SEO and for getting visitors to your site to become customers. A key advantage to hiring Coastal Web to build your website or do your website redesign is that we offer SEO content writing services. Let’s face it. Most business owners are not writers, and don’t have the time to write content for their website anyway. SEO content writing is a specialized area of writing, and our content writer has years of experience in keyword research and crafting clear and informative web text and blogs that are optimized for SEO. If you choose for us to write or rewrite your content, then we will immediately start on that before we create your new design look.
Graphic Design
The look of your site is important, but designing a website is no longer about just the look. Many people get stuck on making their website the best-looking site but that may not be in their best interest. Think about your goals first then determine how important the look of your design will be in overall scheme. When building your new sites graphics, determine if the look helps your brand, keeping colors, catch phrases, logo designs, etc. consistent. There are only so many ways you can construct a web page but if you break it down, they are just text and images built within shapes. When you have an average of 50% of your potential customers looking at your services through a mobile device, most of those graphics will not appear on their phone. Something to think about.
Website Load Speed
In today’s designs, your site must load faster than it has in the past. Google keeps making changes, moving the goal posts as some say, but consistently they are looking for fast-loading sites. They know your potential clients are impatient and will not wait for a slow page to load.
Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (between seconds 0-5). (Portent, 2019)
If your goal is to win awards for best looking design then obviously you need an amazingly cool website with lots of graphics and even some moving parts. And we are
not your solution for that type of website! Why? On the downside of that highly intensive graphic look, that website is going to be huge, regarding file size, and it will take much longer to load on a web browser. That includes foreground and background imagery. With those types of sites, you will have a web page with slow load time and that kills your SEO search engine placement. Forget about getting on page one on any search engine with that graphic-heavy website.
UX Web Design
Technology is always coming up with new terms to make them sound important. The latest for web design and SEO is UX, which is short for user experience. That said, User Experience is very important to understand. If the user experience is not good, a visitor to your site will go away and probably not come back. So yes, UX is very important. Your website needs to load at lightning speed, be easy for users to find what they need, have great content, and have an easy way to do business with you.
88% of people are less likely to return to a website if they had a bad user experience.
Each business is different so I will give you an example on how to address this without a bunch of tech talk. Each page on your site can serve a purpose so we need to build that page to satisfy the needs of your potential client. We build your site, then site pages, with a logical flow of information using graphics to support your information. We also make it load quickly. Then we make sure you have natural call to actions placed strategically on the page.
An Example of What We Mean
For example, let’s say you are a plumber and you have a website with multiple pages about plumbing. A potential client has a clogged toilet so they search for “I need a plumber to fix my clogged toilet”. So, the term “plumber” is amazingly popular and you are competing against 20 million other pages. But we also did the research to know clogged toilets is a good search term and built a page on your website that talks about clogged toilets. So now you have a key phase match for “plumber” and “clogged toilets” which is more likely to get you on page one than just the term plumber. On that Clogged Toilets page, you write about why they can happen and how you can easily solve their issue if they simply click the contact button. Customers want to know you can solve their problem before they will hire you. By laying out some educational information, you show your expertise, and give them confidence to contact you for the job. That is a good website user experience. Now do a great job delivering your product or service for your client and ask for a review.
The Importance of Reviews
It’s important to solicit reviews from each and every customer. You can have it printed at the bottom of an invoice, or have a link within an emailed invoice. Make it as easy as possible for customers to leave reviews. Why is this so important? Because 99.9% of consumers read reviews before deciding who to hire or what product to buy. They want to make an informed decision. In addition, Google uses you’re your content and reviews to determine how trustworthy your business is. I’s actually part of a group of ranking factors known as EAT. That stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Your content shows your expertise and authoritativeness. Your reviews can impact your trustworthiness. In addition, here are a few more points about reviews:
- The more reviews you have, the better your reputation.
- The higher your star rating, the more likely someone will visit your website.
- People expect to see recent reviews.
- It’s important to respond to reviews, both positive and negative.
It shows prospective clients that you care about customer satisfaction. By keeping an eye on your reviews, you know if you and your team are doing a great job, or you can fix the problems if you get a negative review. You don’t want to wait until you get a handful of bad reviews and then cannot figure out why your business slowed down.
Building Your Website
Building a professional, quality, and effective website takes a lot of time. We don’t buy a template and stick your content in there and call it a day! We build websites that can stand up to the needs of your clients and to the main search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The web code we start off with is WordPress then we optimize that code to reduce server processing time. We then use that skeleton file and load in your images, text, pictures, call to actions, tags, and more.
Programming Options
On occasion, we do need to build custom services for some of our clients. We can build that into your WordPress dashboard interface or build a separate database, depending on your needs. For example, building a car inventory interface if you sell vehicles. Maybe you need to list your inventory for sale to your distributors to pre-order supplies. Maybe your employees need certain information on your website that you don’t want your clients or the general public to see. Let us know what you need, and we can build it.
Testing Your Website
After we build your site and load all of the content, images, etc., we run your site in multiple tools to help reduce file size for page loading efficiency. Once all looks good, then we run tests on multiple screen sizes to ensure you have a good look on many screen sizes and web browsers. After launching your site, we then perform additional testing and code modifications, within 30 days, to make sure the site we built has met all the current (at that date) demands of a well-built Search Engine Ready website.
Why Hire Coastal Web?
Over the years we have built a great reputation. Building a quality website takes thought, experience, testing, and follow through. Building a website is no longer just about how it looks! It’s about the behavior of visitors to your site. Ask yourself these questions (we can provide you with analytics to give the answers).
- What was the user experience?
- Did they engage in more than one page?
- How long did they stay on your site?
- Did they contact you either through a phone call or an email?
- Do your visitors return to your website or did they visit only once?
An important question to ask yourself is what is the goal of your website? Most of our clients want their website to help bring in new business. Once we understand your goals, and your business, we can help you select a website design that works best for your company. We’ll give you plenty of options to choose from before narrowing it down to the final web design.
Get a Web Design Quote
Looking for a great website design company? Call Coastal Web Marketing at 410-420-9390 or fill out our contact form to get a quote. link to this page Website Design Quote