Almost every business from every industry in Dubai or anywhere in UAE is having their corporate websites. The corporate website have transformed greatly over the time, earlier a business website was just an online brochure with basic information and company profile, etc. However, now a days’ the corporate websites have become a very capable communication tool. The digital marketing have already surpassed the conventional marketing and businesses are leveraging digital marketing tools to generate a huge part of their sales. In fact some businesses majorly rely on their digital marketing channels, especially the small and medium sized businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE heavily rely on digital marketing instead of utilizing the traditional marketing channels. This is what makes digital marketing more important and for any digital marketing campaign your corporate website is the center-point, it is where all of your prospects from various different channels will converge and convert into a legit lead or a sale. With the rise of smartphones, social media, and intense integration of the technology in our daily lives, the growth in the digital channels is natural. Most of the consumers got influenced by the social media advertisements, the content marketing is considered to be the most effective approach for the B2B businesses and so on.
The consumers look up in the internet to find the best possible solution for their needs, and according to several studies a majority of the business-to-business customers have already completed their research before getting in touch with a sales rep, and most of that research is done via online means.All these indicators are highlighting the importance of a business website. When it comes to development of a corporate website, businesses often overlooked the fact that their corporate website can generate a huge number of sales and leads for them. Another common mistake that most of the businesses and marketers made is to put their different marketing tools and channels in silos, keep them isolated or establish very little connection between them. However, your corporate website sits at the bottom of your digital marketing funnel, as it provides the content targeted towards your audience who is in decision making stage, hence your website will be able to communicate the value proposition and brand message effectively you will get more sales and conversions, else you will end up losing your customer to a competitor. That is what made your corporate website the most valuable and important asset in your digital marketing tool kit. The sale funnel consists of three parts the top, the middle and the bottom, and your website can effectively support you in all three stages along with other relevant tools. In this blog we will discuss how a business can develop a high-converting website and how they can transform their existing corporate websites into a high-converting websites.
High Converting Web Development: Apply Hick’s Law
The Hick’s law is named after a psychologist from Britain, Mr. William Edmund Hick, and the law states that the time that is taken by someone to make a decision is directly proportion to the number of options that are available to them at that moment. The Hick’s law is utilized by different businesses and individuals differently however, it is followed by the leading web development agencies all around the world. The main takeaway is that if you will provide more options to your visitors, then they will take more time to convert, and it will reduce their chances of conversion. There is another similar study conducted by the two leading psychologists, Mr. Mark Lepper and Ms. Sheena Iyengar. The study concluded that when customers are provided with 24 varieties of product the interest was low, but when there were only 6 varieties were offered the interest was much higher so much so that the smaller varieties have 10 times higher purchase rate than the larger varieties racks. The same principles are totally applicable when we deal with a corporate website. If you bombarded your visitors with tens of different options and a lot many links to click on they will eventually end up confused and entangled which will result in poor conversion and very low sales. However, if you limit the options for visitors to drift here and there, they will remain focus, and are more likely to follow the clues to take a desired customer journey and will more likely to convert into a legit lead or a sale.
A website consists of different pages where each page serves a different purpose. The homepage is the main page of a website, it contains pretty much everything that can tell your audience what you do, who you are and what value you can offer to them and so on. That is why the optimization of the homepage and internal pages is slightly different from one another. The very first thing that you can do to reduce the number of options for your visitors is to keep your menu items less, too many options in the main menu will distract your customer and they will eventually lose the interest. The Hick’s law doesn’t only applied to the main navigation, in fact it has to be followed throughout the entire web development, whether it is the rest of the homepage, internal pages, and even blogs or other pages. The best way is to make your homepage more engaging, let say by using the full-screen welcome message with only one or two CTA (call to action) will help you encourage your visitors to scroll down the page to see more options. Similarly in products or services pages, you should focus the entire page on one subject and use only one CTA which will help your audience to take a quick decision and so on. The only thing that you should consider is to prioritize the actions that you want your visitors to perform on a web page and every page should be assigned with at least one primary objective and then it should be developed in a way to focus on that alone. This will help you simplify the user journey and it will also improve their experience.
High Converting Web Development: Apply the Rule of Thirds
The rule of thirds is a very popular photography theory, it means that dividing a photograph in thirds both vertically and horizontally and the four middle intersection points are of the highest strategic importance and can gain the maximum interest of the viewer. The rule of third is very popular among the web development experts in Dubai and all around the UAE in fact this principle is followed all around the world. According to the rule of thirds a web page should be visually divided into third (both vertically and horizontally) and the middle intersection points (four) are where you should place the strategically most important elements of the web page. However, usually we noticed that important elements, whether content or graphics are not aligned with the center area. These center points are the major points of interest, whatever you will place in those places will get more attention from users. For conversion it is very important that you get attention and increase engagement, because when users will be focus on the important things, they will most likely absorb your content or message better and their chances of conversion will increase. You can place your hero image or call to action button on these intersections to increase user engagement. Usually the upper left intersection is used to place heading or tagline, and the bottom left is used to place the CTA (call to action) and the right side is occupied by the hero image. That is one of the best strategy to maximize user’s interest.
High Converting Web Development: Utilize Negative Space
When it comes to the web development the negative space on a web page is the space which doesn’t have any content, it is also referred to as white space. Whereas the positive space is the space where you put content and all other elements of the web page. Mostly the negative space or white space on a web page is taken as a problem, and often businesses thinks that it is a waste of precious real estate on a web page. However, that is not the case, if you utilize negative space intelligently you can significantly improve the customer experience and engagements. The negative space is essential for any web page, without it you can’t maintain the structure of a web page, although too much or too little negative space could be problematic. The negative space is technical term it not only refers the space between larger design elements, but all the unused space is negative space such as space between smaller elements, space between the two paragraphs, and even the space between the letters is all taken as negative space, that is why it is essential for a web page. However, when we put too much space between the heading and the paragraph then it could look disconnected from the heading, and in that case it is truly a waste of precious real estate on the web page. However, the space that is required to form the structure of the content and design elements is necessary.
The negative space is used to focus on the important content or call to action buttons, it is used to distinguish different sections of the web page and different design elements also require negative space between them. There are tons of different uses of the negative space in web development however, the best use is to make your web page more readable, and organized so the readers can easily scan the page and pay attention to the content or sections you want them to focus on. That is how the negative space can significantly improve the customer experience and customer journey which surely lead to higher conversions and sales. Your background of the page or the section, your font type and size and even the font color all should be considered while putting negative space between them. For example, smaller fonts need more space between letters to make it more readable, and they need more line heights to looks better and smooth to our eyes. Larger fonts doesn’t require much inner-letter space or line height. So different design elements require different negative spaces that is why the negative spaces should be used intelligently to make your web page more readable and easy on eyes. Similarly the menus, content widgets, links, paragraphs, images and videos need proper spacing, padding and margins in order to improve the aesthetics of your web page. That is the reason the negative space is very important for web development if you want to improve your conversion rate.
High Converting Web Development: Follow the 8-Seconds Rule
Most of us don’t know that on an average the human attention span is just 8-seconds which is even less than the goldfish. It means that you should be able to capture your visitors’ attention before that time else you will lose them. The 8-second rule dictates that your web page must be able to engage a visitor within the 8 seconds else the chances are they will never engage and leave without converting. Thanks to the modern web development techniques you can easily engage your visitor within 8 second if you follow basic web development best practices. Using a large tagline which offers value and solution of the problem can be a great start however, if you follow the Hick’s rule in placing that tagline and consider negative spacing rules, you can easily attract your visitors to your page. If they liked the heading, which is highly visible and readable, they will most likely to scroll down to absorb more content. Similarly the multi-media content or images can be placed strategically to focus on your CTA (call to action) to encourage your visitors to click on it and perform the action you want them to perform. The micro interaction which can be added by using simple web development techniques can do wonder. More responsive and interactive web pages always gets higher engagement and conversions. The placement of the buttons, the hoover effects, the message on the buttons and using lead magnets will greatly help you to engage your customers and get their attention within 8-seconds. You can always have a look at your web pages from a customer’s prospective to improve engagements which will help you generate more leads and sales.
High Converting Web Development: Implement Gestalt Principle
The Gestalt Principles are developed by a well-reputed and respected psychologist, he not only developed these principles but he also done great work in providing the understanding of human brain’s perception of visual elements and impact of different objects on our perception. The Gestalt principle can be summarized as ‘the perception of a whole is different than the perception of its individual parts’. It is not only that, it also states that we human being perceived visual objects with similar characteristics differently when they are placed closer to each other. The importance of Gestalt principle is crucial in web development, as when we place similar objects and elements that communicate similar message then they should also look similar or at least they should share some characteristics that made them look similar. This will help web developers to highlight certain sections of a web page that communicate a similar message and it also help them separate different sections from one another. Implementing the Gestalt principle at homepage is extremely important, and it is also very helpful in the inner pages. When we place similar object closer to each other and present them is a somewhat similar fashion our brain automatically reduce the white noise of the environment or background and start focusing on these objects which help increasing customer engagements and also result in better conversion rates.
High Converting Web Development: Follow SEO Rules
The SEO or search engine optimization is extremely important for high-converting websites. The SEO friendly web development is a web development process that accounts all major SEO guidelines and standards. Basically there are no sets of rules for the SEO, it is just the guidelines, standards and best practices and usually we refer them to as SEO rules. The search engine optimization or SEO is a technique to align your website with the sets of instructions, requirements, limitations and standards of the search engine. Here in Dubai and anywhere else in UAE the most popular search engine is Google, according to several studies, the Google is the most dominate search engine of the country with having around 96% of the search market share. All other search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, or any other follows the same instructions, standards or criterions. The web development methods, techniques and programing languages that are used to build a website are crucial for its SEO-friendliness. Usually an ordinary corporate website can generate up to 70% of its traffic from the search engines without spending a dime. This is called organic traffic, when someone searched about a product/service, problem, solutions, company, business, etc. the Google or any other search engine show them the relevant websites to their query on the search engine result page (SERP). In order to appear on the top links in that page you should make your website aligned with search engine standards and guidelines. There are certain web development techniques that prevent search engine from reading the website content, hence these should be avoided at all cost. Furthermore there are some additional source codes that can be added on the website to make it more visible and readable for the search engine which help you gain higher ranks in the SERP page. High ranking websites in search engine tend to get more traffic which means you have more opportunities to increase your conversions and sales.
High Converting Web Development: Make it Responsive
The responsive means mobile compatibility or mobile-friendliness. A website is called responsive when it has capabilities to offer similar experience on different devices and platforms. There are multiple layers of compatibility such as different operating systems process website code differently, similarly different web browsers respond to different codes differently and most of the time a same browser on different operating system can behave differently. There are different platform such as Windows, MAC and Linux, then there is a wide range of web browsers, such as Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla, Opera, etc. Apart from there the website also have to be able to adjust itself as per different screen sizes. The regular desktop and laptops have limited number of screen sizes and resolutions which makes it easier to achieve responsiveness on them. However, the smartphones are a little bit tricky. There are two major mobile phone platforms, Android and the Apple iOS. Then again the mobile users use different browsers, and above all there are tons of different screen sizes and resolutions that make responsiveness more complex. There are certain web development platforms that will allow easy integration of the features and programing algorithms in your website which are essential for a responsive website. These platforms will also allow you to achieve seamless compatibilities with almost all of the above mentioned variations of platforms and web browsers. The websites which offer consistent experience on all compatible devices from where the user is accessing them, the chances of conversion increase. Moreover in Dubai and all around the UAE people tend to use smartphone for internet surfing, in fact the smartphone searches have already surpassed the regular desktop/laptop searches which is why if you will develop responsive website you have will get more opportunities and traffic to your website, hence the chances of conversion also increase and you will get more conversions and sales.
Conclusion
The corporate websites have become essential for a modern business. The corporate website is not just your online profile, but it is the foundation of your online identity and image. It is a very capable marketing tool which can help businesses in boosting their sales and conversions. Businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE realized that very well, however, not every business website is producing the expected or desired results for the businesses. This is due to the lack of understanding of the web development process and best practices. In order to build a high-converting website, you need to focus on many things. There are several factors which are important to transform an ordinary website into a highly-converting website. In this blog we have listed some of the most important, effective and market proven methods which will help you maximize your website’s potential and make it a high-converting website. The web development is a technical work, most of the time the business owners or management is not familiar with these concepts. That is why we tried to explain them in simple and plain language. If you will implement these rules and guidelines to your website you can maximize your online conversions and sales. Your corporate website also plays a crucial role in establishing your online presence and brand identity in the online world. That is why it is extremely important to have an excellent website. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to build you a high-converting business website, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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