Your Squarespace web designer should understand digital marketing
Websites are a powerful marketing tool, and a key component of good web design is a fundamental understanding of digital marketing.
There are a lot of Squarespace designers out there who can build beautiful websites. A beautiful website, however, isn’t enough to grow your business. Great web design finds the intersection between design and strategy.
When creating a website today, it is imperative web designers first consider your website goals.
While most designers take website goals into account, another component crucial to success will be understanding how you will use marketing to reach those goals. When web designers have a solid understanding of digital marketing, they can design a website that better meets your needs.
Good web designers consider target market, keywords you want to rank for, your current digital marketing landscape, how you will drive traffic, your cost per conversion, and your intended ad spend.
Squarespace web design: understanding business pain points and what strategies and tactics to implement to reach business goals.
Often people understand the importance of a strong visual identity and want a modern website that wins customers but haven’t thought about how they will drive traffic and the role this will play in reaching their conversion rate goals.
The relationship between traffic and conversion rate is not always crystal clear at first glance. At times, people will think they need to invest heavily in paid traffic channels to win more sales, when they would be much better off to improve their website usability. Other times, a website might benefit greatly from driving more traffic. Let’s look at both scenarios below.
Scenario One: Good website traffic, but a poor conversion rate
Let’s say Indoorsy.ca, a fictional company specializing in everything to make your home more comfortable sells luxury slippers for $100.
They are bottoming out on sales and think it is because they need more website traffic (believing more traffic = more sales). This isn’t necessarily untrue. However, after looking at their current website and digging into their analytics it is clear there are a lot of opportunities to improve the website. After looking into their website performance, we learn their current conversion rate is only 1%.
Conversion rate is simply the the percentage of visitors that take a desired action on your website.
This can be any number of actions, but most commonly it is purchases. Conversion = Conversions/Visits.
For hypothetical reasons, let’s say our fictional company, Indoorsy, currently makes 10 sales a day, and regularly averages around 1000 daily visitors.
Before improved user experience
Sales: 10 daily
Conversion rate: 1%
Daily Traffic: 1000 (ish)
Daily Revenue: $1000
Monthly Revenue: $30,000
After improved user experience
Now, let’s say this company were to improve their user experience and and increase their conversion rate to 3% while maintaining their current traffic, meaning indoorsy.ca is now selling 30 pairs of slippers a day.
Sales: 30 daily
Conversion rate: 3%
Daily Traffic: (1000) ish
Daily Revenue: $3,000
Monthly Revenue: $90,000
Paying for more traffic could have squeezed out a few more conversions. However, if they website is poorly designed, it is likely a lot of that traffic would not result in sales, meaning when and if conversions occur, the cost of conversion would be quite high. For some companies, once they account for their production costs, adding $15 for each conversion can really eat into their margins and therefore profits. Once the website is optimized and user experience is improved you can start thinking about adding more traffic through paid and organic tactics.
Scenario two: Not much website traffic, but a solid conversion rate
Now, let’s look at scenario two. In this case, it looks like their website traffic is pretty underwhelming, however, based on the traffic they do get, they have a solid conversion rate.
Before improved website traffic
Daily Traffic: 500 (ish)
Sales: 15 daily
Conversion rate: 3 %
Daily Revenue: $ 1500
Monthly Revenue: $45,000
After improved website traffic
In this example, let’s say the conversion rate of 3% is maintained but the website traffic increases, meaning meaning indoorsy.ca is now selling 30 pairs of slippers a day.
Daily Traffic: (1000) ish
Sales: 30 daily
Conversion rate: 3%
Daily Revenue: $3,000
Monthly Revenue: $90,000
As you can see, in this scenario, adding more traffic allowed Indoorsy to double its monthly revenue. An important thing to remember is not all traffic is created equal. You need to drive quality traffic. Bidding on keywords that are tangentially related to your offering might drive a ton of traffic, but it doesn’t mean it will result in more conversions. Instead, it might result in high ad spend, a high bounce rate, and a short time-on-site.
Bounce rate looks at the number of visitors who only visit a single page without visiting a second page. For example, did they click on a search result, land on your website, and quickly leave to see if another search result is better suited to their inquiry? Ideally, people will be motivated to click around your website because they are impressed, or their initial interaction with your website piques their interest.
Time on site is just as it sounds - how long do people spend on your website? What is the average session duration? Are people engaging with your content or leaving after a few seconds.
If you have a solid conversion rate and throw a lot of poor quality traffic into the mix, you likely won’t get a lot of new sales, rather you will just drag your conversion rate down. So before driving more traffic it is very important to think about your audience, their intent, where they are in the buyers journey and the kind of content they will engage with.
Understanding how to best use your digital marketing resources for growing your business and promoting your Squarespace website
A digital marketing SWOT allows you to look at your current marketing landscape and better assign your time, energy and money when trying to drive results.
When it comes to examining your strengths and weaknesses from a digital marketing perspective, you may learn you have more competitors than initially thought, and customer acquisition may be costly.
You might also come across new opportunities to serve a far larger audience than a brick-and-mortar operation or uncover creative ways to engage with your large Instagram following.
Through an online SWOT you may learn that your search engine rankings aren't great, and your target search terms are very competitive. While you may want to “be on the first page of Google” you might not have the resources for this, and it is better to try different channels.
After taking a deeper looking at your digital marketing landscape, you might learn that you have excellent engagement on a different channel such as Instagram or TikTtok. Accordingly, it might be a better use of resources to drive traffic from these channels.
Alternatively, you might have a pretty lacklustre social media following, but that your niche is not incredibly saturated in Google rankings. This might give you an opportunity to work on your search engine optimization efforts and improve your discoverability in search engines.
The relationship between audience intent and search engine optimization
Part of succeeding in both SEO, and conversion optimization is understanding search intent. To get clearer on the kind of keywords phrases you’ll want to rank for, you’ll want to think of the kind of language your audience might use.
Keyword personas are a way to create a fictional version of your audience based on their interests and goals. In order to best reach them online, you have to know what they’re looking for—and that includes the keywords they use.
In general, SEO activities can be divided into two categories: on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization is focused on improving the content of your website so that it's more relevant to search engine queries and easier for users to find what they're looking for. Off-page optimization refers mainly to link building (link building being the process of acquiring links from other websites), which helps Google determine how useful or trustworthy your site is.
For already established businesses, you can look into your website and in app analytics. This will help you gather information around keywords people use to find you, what blog content is gaining traction, or what service pages your audience visits the most, along with demographic and psychometric data that can help shape your target market. If you are currently running or have ran Google search campaigns, you can also see the kind of key word phrases people are using to search our your product or services and this can help inform your keyword strategy.
Speaking with customer care teams, conducting surveys, or speaking directly with clients is another option for gathering information.
Different people will use different search terms to find your services
It is important to remember you will likely have a few different buyer personas and based and they may all use different search terms to seek out your products and services.
When you create your buyer personas you’ll want to think about how different personas will interact with your website and impact your business goals.
So for example, if you are creating a website that sells online fitness classes you may have a few different personas such as:
The fitness enthusiast: This person is passionate about fitness, and they know exactly what kind of fitness programming they are after. They are more likely to use technical terms when seeking out services.
The recreation buddy: This person really enjoys fitness, prefers working out in nature, and being outside is a big part of their lifestyle. They are a bit more flexible and relaxed when it comes to trying new workouts. In addition, they have enough base knowledge to know the kind of programming they like. This person might dig around your website a bit and read Q & A’s or reviews before deciding what class they would like to try. This person may use more exploratory search terms.
The fitness newcomer: This person finds fitness intimidating, but they want to make it part of their lifestyle. They don’t want to feel discouraged and need to see inviting content. They are committed to making fitness part of their day-to-day life but have no idea where to start. These people may use search terms that are less technical.
Buyer personas are helpful but they can be limiting - people are complicated. That said, they are a decent place to start. For an excellent article on building buyer personas that start with empathy, visit this article from Webflow.
Good web design and marketing work together
In summary, amazing marketing can’t make up for a poorly designed website. And, a great looking website ins’t enough to win in today’s competitive market. Continually optimizing and experimenting with your website and marketing mix can allow for great insights and lead to business wins.
