As an online marketer, or an entrepreneur who depends on sales and sales leads from your website, you are always eager for your web designer to do their best to promote your brand. And while you’re at it, you do your very best to keep your own web design strategies secret. You don’t want your competitors to know what you are up to.
However, did you ever doubt that your competitor’s web designer is doing the same – hiding some remarkable website strategies from you? It’s true - and there are 5 such strategies that they don’t want you to know about.
Website Design Strategies Your Competitors Use
Your web designer is probably doing his or her best to make sure your website ranks high on Google or other search engines. The web design agency you work with might be running weekly or monthly GoogleAds promotions to ensure you get top place in searches. However, here are 5 things that some of your competitor’s web design agencies are doing, that might also interest you:
1) Clarity: Take a look at your own website, and then compare it with that of the competition. Most designers today are aiming for a clear and concise design – and message. If your own site doesn’t have easy to understand content and layout, it’s time you learned from your competitor’s web designing agency. Your website must be clear – simple to use and simple to order on. Get some friends or colleagues, that don't visit your website that often, to act as test subjects for you. Get them to do a few tasks on your website and then on your competitor's website and get them to honestly tell you the differences in using each site. You will be surprised by the results.
2) Simplicity: It’s very tempting to include the latest Flash or Java add-ons to give your site all the latest components – but does your website really need them?. In a lot of cases your our competitors know better. Their web design team went for less complexity and more simplicity. What they don’t want you to notice is that their website design has a simple layout and is easy to navigate. And that’s the secret to attracting more traffic. Again, do the website visitor text with some of your colleagues or friends and again get them to visit your website and your competitor's websites. Get them to do, for example, four new website tasks back to back and ask them to comment on the simplicity of doing those jobs on each website
3) Regularity: Your web design agency might get you to spend hundreds of euros on advertisements, but you still won’t win the rankings war against the competition on just that alone. That’s because they (your competitors) are secretly performing regular updates to their web site design and content. That’s what keeps visitors coming back for more…and it’s also the secret to making visitors stick around longer on their website. You need to add new content to your website every week if possible – that will keep Google and website visitors interested in your content.
4) Maintainability: While the KIS-principle (Keep It Simple) is the best way to design websites, even the simplest website design needs to be maintained regularly and quickly. What the competition doesn’t want you to know is that, while their web design team has kept it simple, they are also using technology – like an easy to Content Management System (CMS) - to make updating and maintaining the site simple and easy. As a result, their site always is the first to get the most recent updates and refreshed content. And that’s what makes a site a “go to” source for web surfers.
5) Action-ability: Take a critical look at your website. Has your web design company provided everything you need to convert visitors to paying customers? Product Enquiry buttons; Contact Us forms; Subscribe tick boxes?. Great - but why does your web site design have all these Calls To Action (CTAs) on one page? Doing so overwhelms visitors, and they will fail to act. Competitors often do not have too many CTAs - just 1 or 2 per page. And that’s their secret to clean web site design that gets results.
Planning Your Web Design Response
Now that you know 5 well-guarded web design secrets that your competitor is trying to hide from you, what are you going to do now? Here are a few recommendations:
- Meet with your web design team soon and discuss what you’ve learned here
- Get your website design agency to create an action plan to incorporate all of these competitor strategies into your overall online presence strategy
- Make sure you have specific action items identified, that your web team must implement weekly, monthly, quarterly and beyond.
The idea is that you should challenge your web design agency to not only learn from what the competition is doing, but to also out-do the competition by coming up with frequent and regular changes to your own online marketing strategy. If you fall into the trap of refreshing and updating your website design once every year or two, chances are that you’ll be left so far behind, that no amount of time, effort or money spent will help you catch up to the competition.
Consumers can be quite fickle. If your website design agency fails to keep them coming back to your website, the competitors website team will entice them with their site.
