Do I Need a New Website in 2019?

Websites are so important in this ever-growing digital world. They have replaced the traditional shop window when it comes to displaying your business. Oftentimes people try and separate SEO and website design but in truth, they are incredibly intrinsically linked. SEO is all about improving your websites rankings on search results pages, so it’s clear to see that the two are linked and shouldn’t be separated from one another.

This has always been the case, but why are we talking about this now more than ever in 2019? Google is constantly making changes to its algorithm, which is why we at Digital Ethos are constantly upping our game, and this year there are some big changes that link to website design. Check out this guide to see why you could need a new website in 2019.

The Purpose of a Website

Websites look better now than ever before. Taking a trip down memory lane to those websites created in the 90s in the early days of the internet is certainly not a pleasant trip. The philosophy of what a website should be hasn’t changed all that much though, just the ways that you can achieve these aims.

One way to view your site is that it is a digital storefront. It presents your company to the whole of the internet. The content on those landing pages is the equivalent to what you saw in the shop windows when walking down your local high street. If you have a rubbish shop front, nobody will step in to buy anything so you make your shop front as attractive as possible to your target audience. You need to have this mentality when designing your website. Making sure users don’t look at your shop front and run away is the real aim of web design. Thinking about what they want, making it easy to find and making it visually pleasing to your target audience. Make sure what they see is what you want.

Here is the challenge when it comes to designing a website. First, you need to recognise that there is more than one type of person coming to the site. Second that each person comes with different needs, looking to solve different problems.

SEO and Website Design

Therefore you should create a website with a specific purpose in mind. This is so what you’re presenting is what your desired user will want to see. The purpose can change depending on the website, for example, an informational site like Wikipedia will have a different purpose to e-commerce sites like Amazon. This links to SEO very closely, you have to imagine search queries as questions you are seeking to answer and answer it better than the competition. Once that question is answered, they need to then take action on this so the site should also encourage this. The page they land on should be answering the question they originally had, as well as a great website design so they can access further information easily when their initial question is answered.

The goal then is identifying who are the different user types who are coming to your website. Then to identify what specifically are the problems they are trying to solve. And then to make sure each user’s needs are clearly displayed in a visually compelling manner (people don’t like to read these days). SEO can be a long and intensive process by measuring results over long periods of time, but better websites can bring around some real change.

Why Website Design Matters Even More for SEO in 2019

It used to be that website design wasn’t quite as important for SEO and ranking well because you could game the system a bit. Google would read your site as Google rather than a person, they didn’t have proper algorithms that could analyse the design of a website so well. It just crawled the content of the site to see if it hit the ranking factors it had set.

The number of blogs you see on the search results pages which are only there to rank pages rather than being read speaks to this issue. They are appealing to Google the search engine rather than those who are searching, the customer. This isn’t how it should be and Google is working on fixing that.

Google introduced Google Panda in 2011, an algorithmic update aiming to tackle this. Google Panda was given a rigorous set of questions to answer when looking at content. These were all aimed at the user and human quality ratings. It basically tries to assess if the content is high-quality or not and relevant to the users.

The main algorithm now works in conjunction with Google RankBrain to assess content and rank it. RankBrain is a separate algorithm, which assesses user experience with content in a different way. While Panda wants to make sure it looks good and asks hypothetical questions of the content, predicting what users will do, RankBrain instead analyses how users engage with the content to determine if it’s good or not. RankBrain focuses on user experience signals (UX signals) and the two most important are: Dwell time is how long a searcher spends on your page. It’s relevant because if a person clicks on your search result and decides that it isn’t relevant or doesn’t answer the query, it clearly shouldn’t be high up on the first page. How many times have you wanted to find out some information, clicked on the first result and realised it was irrelevant and left immediately. Google sees this and is constantly trying to adjust the first page due to this.

Therefore RankBrain penalises pages with low dwell time and boosts pages with high dwell time. The average dwell time is around 3 minutes and 10 seconds so you need to try and keep users around for at least this time. Therefore you not only need people to click your content but you need them to stay there for RankBrain to view it as relevant.

Website Design and Dwell Time

So why does this matter to website design? This is because Google now has a more elegant way of measuring if people immediately turn their noses up at your website. They are essentially trying to analyse user experience with web pages.

This obviously means you should now tailor new content appropriately but this is only half the battle. You can optimise the content all you like but if your site is just unappealing to look at, a lot of people will simply just leave. You don’t want all that hard work to go to waste! There are four ways in which you can improve user experience with great web design:

Method 1: Layout

Making content and information easier for people to use is essential. Highlight the important sections of the content and make it easier to digest the information. If a user enters your site and is visually attacked with the distracting and unreadable font or flashy background colours, that user will surely hit the back button immediately. The layout should be pleasing on the eye so they can easily process it. You have only 3 seconds to catch the users interest. 

Method 2: Aesthetic

It’s not that the users are looking for good-quality photos to consider reading an article, but it grabs their attention and would make them want to scan through the entire page. The website’s design is like the red carpet in a hotel lobby. It has to be elegant enough to attract attention but it’s not really the reason why the guests are there. The red carpet makes them feel like the hotel is an exclusive place, and they will see something more elegant if they will walk further. So, yeah, choose the colours, graphics, and photos very wisely. Positive user experience starts there.

Method 3: Trust Factors

Not only is aesthetic quality needed just to make it look nice, but it also adds a layer of professionalism. This makes people far more willing to do business with you, especially on e-commerce websites. Adding any other information, like certificates, SSL certificates, registered addresses and phone numbers as well will give people a level of security when dealing with your site.

Method 4: Mobile Optimisation

Google is really emphasising this year on year and for good reason! More and more people are choosing their phone over their computers to ingest content. Searches especially are done over your phone when you’re out and about, needing information on the spot. If they load up a site poorly optimised for mobile, they’re off like a flash. They don’t have time to waste trying to load and navigate a poorly optimised page. Make sure (like, right now, go and check your website using your mobile device) that your website is accessible anytime and anywhere.

Method 5: Method 5: Pageless Design

Take a note from incredibly successful social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. What do they all have in common? Continuous scrolling, the feed never ends and users get sucked in. It is a simple piece of design but if you are an e-commerce site for example, being able to endlessly scroll through products is the dream. Requiring less effort to access all the contents of your site is a plus factor for users. This means both parties win, users get an easier experience to browse and you can show them even more of your products.

Website Design Take Home Points

Google is now making the market more and more competitive with sophisticated algorithms measuring user experience with your site. Positive user experience will result in a longer dwell time, which Google will notice and measure. Not only will users be more encouraged to interact with the rest of your site but Google will push you up in the search results page. It’s a win-win situation.

These are a few main improvements you can make, but oftentimes if your site hasn’t received any attention for a long time some wholesale improvements might be needed. We at Digital Ethos can build you a new site which is easy for both you to edit and manage as well as easy for customers to use. We offer comprehensive website design and development services. Rethink your digital storefront and really ask yourself, is this going to give the user a positive experience?