Web trends that change everything
Over the last 18 months, two digital trends have really come to the fore. Website design/construction and ‘all things content’. Both of which we’ve been advocating to clients for a while and built into our recent website refresh.
Neither trend is new, as such, and they’re still being adopted. And like most trends, they didn’t appear overnight. Early conversations around Responsive Web Design (RWD) started in 2009 and gained real traction a couple of years ago.
Responsive design
The goal for a RWD approach is to design and build sites that give any visitor an optimal experience. As Wikipedia says, this makes for ‘easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling – across a wide range of devices from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones’.
And that’s the key thing here. Site visitors, prospects and customers alike will view your site on a massive range of devices. If they have a poor viewing and interaction, that’s a poor brand experience right from the start. There’s a whole field behind user experience (UX) – too much to describe here – but suffice to say, UX design is something we’re passionate proponents of.
Active content creation
By active content creation, we mean a planned approach to meaningful and effective content creation, on a concerted basis, focusing around your website – specifically a blog – as ‘the hub’. Phew, bit of dictionary definition there. The rise of content marketing has seen lots of brands take content creation seriously.
But there’s more to it than ad-hoc blog posts or infographics. You need to know who you are writing for. What will they find useful? How are you going to share that content in different formats? Again, there’s a whole field devoted to content creation/marketing and we will happily talk about that for many an hour (and supply the tea to keep things going). But for the purposes of this blog post, let’s just say it’s a trend you should be on board with if you’re not already.
Put it to the test
In a wholly unscientific test, we wanted to assess the impact of both responsive web design and concerted (meaningful) content creation on a website’s traffic. So we had a look close to home at the newish SHARP website and blog. We launched the new site at the start of 2015 so we have five months or so of data to look at and to compare to the same period last year.
Lots of factors impact a site’s traffic ‘ups and downs’ but we have a good period of time to review and have filtered out any other marketing activity. We’re looking here at organic traffic to the site, ‘awarded’ by Google through the use of responsive design (and with a specific eye on the responsive design/mobile algorithm changes of 21st April) and (we hope!) great content.
So have these factors helped? The short answer is yes – we’ve seen an uplift in organic site traffic and longer dwell times on the site. These factors in isolation don’t guarantee additional enquiries or new business for us, of course, so we’re looking at additional SEO activity as well as onsite conversion and UX tests to really optimise things.
In a nutshell, a RWD and content-focused approach really does work. We can talk about these areas factors till the cows come home, so please do contact us if you are looking to update your website and content marketing.