According to Hubspot, 76% of consumers say the most important aspect of website design is that the website makes it easy for them to find what they want. If your visitors say they can’t find what they want on your website easily, or if you are building a new one from scratch, you need to hire a website design consulting service.
Besides the ease of finding what they want, visitors to your website want a site that has a beautiful appearance and one that offers an intuitive interactive experience. These are all great goals, but it might take ages to achieve them without the input of a qualified website consultant.
If you are eager to know how web consulting services can help, this article is for you. Let’s get to it!
What is Website Design Consulting?
Website design consulting as a service applies to both existing and new websites. It is the process by which web consultants outline, design, and monitor a website to ensure it has a high success rate on the internet.
What Does a Website Design Consultant Do?
A website design consultant is primarily an advisor who uses evidence to offer business owners high-quality advice on how to establish a functional website from point zero or improve the design of an already existing website.
Depending on the consultant, you can expect them to do the following:
- User experience design
- Determine the best platform for the website, such as WordPress
- Develop a solid website design strategy
- Test your website for compatibility on different browsers
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Authoring (Website authoring)
- Carry out a needs analysis
- Web graphic design
- Interface design
- Website design training
Website Design Consultants vs. Web Developers
Before we proceed any further, it’s important to explain the difference between web design consultants and web developers. While the two are related, there are fundamental differences.
A website consulting services provider is the first cog in the wheel. The consultant evaluates a business’s target audience, needs, and goals to come up with a website design strategy. Web developers follow this strategy when making a new website or enhancing an existing one.
8 Ways a Website Design Consulting Service Can Help Your Business Succeed
Now you know what website design consulting is and what a web consultant does. Let’s now look at ways the consulting services can help your business make it in 2022 and beyond.
1. Aiding Your SEO Strategy
Your website is the main online door to your business. Without it, your digital marketing efforts will be futile in the long run, especially if you also don’t have other internet assets like mobile- or web-based apps.
With a good website, your business can put up quality content that can rank well on a search engine like Google through whitehat SEO strategies. Web design consultants help you build site traffic so that you can keep engaged with useful content.
Aspects of website design that help your search engine optimization strategy include:
- SEO-friendly website code
- Structured sitemap
- On-page SEO
- Ease of navigation
- Proper use of visuals like videos and images
- Mobile-friendliness
- Pagespeed
2. Building Trust with Your Target Audience
Your website consulting company can set you up for success by ensuring you have a well-designed website that your customers can trust. Existing and potential customers want to see a site that is up to date and well-kept, complete with high-quality website content.
When you think of it, it’s easy. Position yourself in the shoes of your potential clients. If you landed on your website as a client, would you trust yourself enough to do business with yourself? If the answer here is no or there are buts to it, you need website consulting experts.
Trust building is particularly important for e-commerce websites. In the digital marketing space, prospective clients who find you not trustworthy enough end up leaving your site and doing commerce with another more credible competitor.
You must build a loyal client base by ensuring your website design is on par with the current trends, stays up to date all the time, and contains up-to-date content. An SEO services provider can help you keep the content updated all the time.
3. Helping You Compete Better
As a business owner, you should know that your competitors are already using web designers and consultants to make their websites better each day. Your goal should be to outdo them, and a website design consulting service can help you achieve this end.
Web design consultants do a competitive analysis that pits you against your competitors to see what they do that you too should be doing at an even better scale to beat them at their own game.
The goal is to have a website that performs better than those of the competitors in areas such as general appearance, responsiveness, search engine ranking, and ease of use.
4. Designing an Easy-to-use Website
If your website consulting service provider doubles as a web developer, you are in good hands as they can best understand their own recommendations for the website design and create one that is responsive, easy to use, and fast-loading.
An easy-to-use website has a design that makes it easy to find aspects such as the CTA buttons, navigational elements, and ways for the website visitor to contact you.
If your website makes it hard for visitors to contact you, they will just skip back to the search results page and give their business to the next competitor whose website is easy to use, even though yours ranked better in the SERPS.
5. Enhancing Your Business’s Brand Identity
Web designers offer insights that help your web development partners make a cohesive site that echoes your unique brand identity, making it easy for customers to identify you and build trust.
Web design elements that aid in branding include fonts, logos, typography, formatting, colours, headers, and footers. The website design also has to be consistent across all pages of the site.
The consistency in these elements helps clients identify you easily from among other websites they come across.
Your web designer must ensure that all the elements that go into branding are consistent all over the site. For example, if you use blue and orange colours to brand yourself, the same colours should be used on the website to avoid confusing your visitors.
6. Analyzing and Sharing Site Metrics
How would you know your site needs improving if you don’t measure and analyze various metrics in it?
Using tools like Google Analytics and PageSpeed Insights, your web consulting agency can show you how your site performs and what areas need improvements.
You may not always have the time to run your marketing strategies parallel to doing daily business activities like serving customers.
Whether you have an in-house marketing team or not, you might have a hard time balancing between marketing and providing professional services, which warrants hiring a digital marketing agency.
If you are lucky, you can find a holistic agency that not only ramps up your digital marketing efforts but also doubles as a web design consulting firm. This is the case at Canopy Media. We can develop your website strategy and offer services up to and including analyzing metrics as well as preparing reports.
Some website metrics to consider include bounce rate, traffic sources, conversion rate, ranking keywords, and the number of unique visitors that spend time on your site.
The web consulting business you work with must do the necessary analysis and present the findings to you, complete with recommendations on what needs improving and how the same will be done.
7. Foreseeing Site Issues Before They Happen
What if you had a running marketing campaign and your customers are the ones telling you that they can’t do business with you because there is an issue with the campaign or the site?
One aspect that makes a website design expert reliable is being able to foresee hitches that may occur on your site and offer ways for correcting the same in advance.
In the development stage, your site is still in its infancy and is bound to experience glitches that may not even have anything to do with you or the developer.
You’ll want such issues to be caught quickly and corrected before they impact visitors.
8. Enhancing Website Conversions
Website conversion is the ultimate goal of every business that builds a website as the gateway through which existing and potential clients can find them.
You’ll want to put up high-quality content on your website to persuade your visitors to take action, without which you won’t generate any sales.
Once you have a smooth website design with content in place, you’ll want to add web conversion elements such as calls-to-action (CTAs) and landing pages. These two are far on the persuasive end of your marketing efforts, and you must ensure they don’t turn customers away.
A well-designed website makes it easy for visitors to follow your landing pages and use the CTAs to complete various actions such as buying a product, downloading an eBook, giving out their contact details, or even contacting you through the site.
Conclusion
Since you may not have the time or expertise for it, leaving your website development and management to a website design consulting service can be one of the best business decisions you’ll ever make.
The consulting designer can set you up for success by enhancing your marketing endeavours with a website that ramps up your online presence when it ranks well in search engines, brings in high-quality leads, and ultimately turns them into buying customers.
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