Author: yarra

They say never to judge a book by its cover but how many of your customers do you think judge your business based on your website? 75% of them.

Having a well designed website isn’t a vanity issue, it’s matter of cold-hard-economics and if your users don’t trust your website you can guarantee it will put a freeze on your company accounts.

So take on board my 4 reasons below and you’ll be sure to have a website your customers can trust.

Recommended reading: 5 Web Design Influencers to Follow (Plus One Bonus)

Complete disclosure

One of the absolute basics of having a website that inspires trust is being upfront with your visitors by having all the important details about your business and goods/service. These include things such as:

• Contact information
• Your registered charity/company number
• Company address
• Shipping costs
• Any tax charges/additional fees (for products)

By having complete upfront disclosure on your website, you’ll let your customers know you have nothing to hide and show yourself to be a business that can be trusted.

In your website design, make sure that logos and other prominent social proof features stand out. Always have terms & conditions pages, and create a knowledge base in the form of FAQs to reassure people they are dealing with a quality outfit.

Convincing content and visual components

You have just 6 seconds to grab the attention of your visitors and make a positive first impression. With so little time it needs to be clear to your users from the layout, appearance, theme, and colour scheme that your website is someplace they can rely on for quality content and data.

There are some simple and basic details that will ensure your website’s content and visual components inspire trust:

• Streamline your content
• Choose a colour that inspires the right emotional response from your users
• Select a font that’s easy to digest
• Incorporate visual content into your website to break up the text
• Use empty spaces to allow your users eyes to rest.

Your brand isn’t all about how you look and what you say, but if you don’t get the visual and content elements right, your users won’t look beneath the surface.

This is where care and attention to detail pays off — you want your website to look professional and convincing, so make sure that everything hangs together. At the same time, direct language and colloquialisms aren’t always a bad thing.

Look after your users’ data

In the aftermath of revelations about Facebook, it’s essential you demonstrate to your users that they can trust your website to look after their data. Web design can help build confidence in a big way.

For Australian companies, this is now a case of convincing your European users that your website follows GDPR guidelines, while European websites risk legal action if they don’t adhere to EU data legislation.

But getting your users to trust that your website can look after their data isn’t just a compliance matter, it’s essential to the long-term success of your business:

• If you want to set up targeted advertising campaigns you must incorporate user data
• If you want to save time by automating via easy email templates you need accurate user data (and permission to target them).

Include pop ups that tell your users your website is looking after their data and they’ll trust that they can give you their business. Fail to do this, and they will take their custom to companies they can trust.

Clear and simple site navigation

How many websites have you visited and departed in frustration because you’ve not been able to find what you want? Countless. If you don’t want your users to do the same to your website you have 3 seconds to convince them they can find what they want.

You can make sure that your website is clear and simple to navigate by following a few basic guidelines:

• Underlining all of your hyperlinks and no other text – your users subconsciously expect hyperlinks to be underlined and if other content is underlined it will confuse them. Make the most of internal links from a UX perspective
• Use one navigation bar – more than one will leave your users unsure of how to find what they want. If you have a second one, make its secondary nature clear
• Focus on the mobile experience – most people will be coming to your site on a mobile device, so you must ensure the experience is as streamlined as possible. Speed is becoming increasingly important.

Providing your users with an easy to understand and intuitive site experience will inspire them to trust that they can find what they want on your website, increasing your chances of keeping them there for longer than 3 seconds.

Conclusion

A well designed website isn’t just about showcasing the benefits of your brand. It’s also about convincing your users that your company can be trusted because if you can’t do this they’ll take their business elsewhere. So review your website and make sure you can tick off each of these 4 reasons to make sure your users can believe in your business.

About the Author:

Kayleigh Alexandra is a content writer for Micro Startups — a site dedicated to giving through growth hacking. Visit the blog for your latest dose of startup, entrepreneur, and charity insights from top experts around the globe, along with pointers on how to make sure your website is set up to benefit your users. Follow us on Twitter @getmicrostarted.

Visit Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social site today and you’re met with a variety of social influencers who seem to be doing just that – influencing. Brands leverage them as spokespeople and in return gain insight and popularity with their target markets. It’s a surprisingly and effective technique for brand awareness, ultimately resulting in revenue thanks to what experts call soft-selling techniques. While the Yarra Web teams believes that your success as a brand or company is rooted in transparent and authentic content marketing and Web design, partnering with social influencers can help elevate you even further. That’s why today’s post is focused on how to partner with social influencers.

Who Are Your Consumers?

It starts with knowing your consumer. What’s their demographic? Are they a 20-something-year-old female? Are they a retired couple? There are dozens of ways to determine this, and most are rooted in the data that your marketing team should be driving. Take advantage of Google Analytics and dozens of other sites and tools that can help profile your consumer. Thanks to technology today, many of them are already doing the social influencer work for you. They not only know who your consumer is, but they know what their profiles and shopping habits are.

Brand Ambassadors vs Social Influencers

If they don’t, you’re going to need to do a little research, but it’s become increasingly easy with the World Wide Web and our advances in technology. Think of social influencers as billboards for you. You simply need to do a little exploring to determine who is the right fit. Spend some time on different social sites and look into who your target consumer looks up to. It’s important to note that there’s a difference between social influencers and brand ambassadors. Both provide a lot of value to your product or brand, but we’ll focus on brand ambassadors in a future post. Social influencers are a bit more authentic, as they’ve hopefully chosen to use your product or are passionate about your brand, while brand ambassadors are frequently hired by the company to evangelize your work.

How Do You Know They Are Right for You?

Social influencers need to check a few things off the list. They should be aligned with your company’s personality, its values and its ethos. They need to be active on social media with a large following so that you can reach as many consumers as possible. They should be dedicated towards their personal brand, with yours as a secondary priority. This makes them a great cheerleader for the work that you do. Did you know that 90% of consumers will buy into recommendations from peers versus advertisements? That’s why social influencers play such a huge role in marketing these days.

Questions? Comments? Let us know. The Yarra Web team would love to hear from you.

It’s the age-old adventure, routing traffic to your site and blog. You’ve already crossed the first step off of the to-do list – you’ve created the content. You’ve spent hours and hours (we assume, maybe you’re a wizard and very fast at this part) designing and drafting and editing and uploading and coding and finally… your site and your blog are complete. But now the next part of the hard work begins, gaining followers and further- ensuring that they remain on your site. Our team at Yarra Web knows that content strategy and SEO are both important parts of the strategies we put together for clients. Today, we’re sharing five tips that will help you keep your readers on your blog, as well as improve your rankings:

Maximize the Power of Your Headlines

They’re the first thing that your readers will see, and they can be the lever that keeps your readers on the blog or pushes them away. Get creative – try different formats to gauge which your readers respond to best. You may be writing about the most boring topics, but if your headline is engaging, they’ll stick around that much longer.

Make sure that you incorporate your keywords so that sites like Google still help you maximize the best SEO for your site. Have a strategy for your headers as well. Both your readers and search engines need to know what that section is about. Headers are also important because they help orient your readers if they get lost on a page. Take advantage of an h1 tag in your first piece of content and think of it as the chapter in a book. H1 tags let search engines know what the primary focus on the article is.

Be Strategic with Your UX

If someone is searching for your site, chances are good that they’re searching with a question or a need. An example would be, “how do I clean my gutters?” Make sure that the flow of your blog is answering the challenges that your product or business solves.

Look at your keywords and ensure that the top third of your blog always contains content with these keywords integrated. It’s also important to note that we can no longer think of a UX journey as linear. It used to be the case that 100% of viewers started at the homepage and continued their journey from there. Now, only 50% begin their journey on your homepage, with search engines pointing your readers to multiple different pages on your site.

Ensure That the Content of Your Blog Is Evergreen

Evergreen means that it will always be accurate and applicable, there is no need to go back and update it. Avoid news and statistics. Focus on information that’s valuable to your readers and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future like tips and tricks instead. You would need to avoid plagiarism so that your provided content can be a great value addition for your readers. Evergreen content serves as a great anchor for your blog and your readership base.

You provide value to your customers because this information remains accurate, it stands the test of time. Make sure that your evergreen content is able to pass the long click test. The longer that a reader spends on your blog, the better the content looks to Google, giving them a reason to move it up in searches.

Write so That Your Audience Will Share

Creating better content sounds like a no brainer, but it’s often missed by companies. You’ve probably heard the phrase “content is king” and it’s true. But it’s not just about the quality of writing, it’s being strategic with the information shared, and writing for your target audience. Write content that meets a need. What does your audience love? What are they passionate about? Ask yourself if your content falls into the buckets of cool, funny, or useful. If it doesn’t, rethink it. Audiences today want to share what they read, so incorporate graphics, videos or statistics.

Be Thoughtful About Keyword Density

If you’re unfamiliar, keyword density is the percentage of times that one of your keywords appears on your blog or site, compared to the total number of words on the page. While it’s important to include your keywords, don’t oversaturate your content with them. The magic number is 1-3% to maximize your SEO and keep readers on your blog. Keep in mind that if you’re using your keywords much more than that, it can come off as spamming, so you want to be strategic.

Keep these tips in mind and you’ll be well on your way to improving your SEO and your blog readership. Questions? Comments? Let us know. The Yarra Web team would love to hear from you.

Marketing is an ever-evolving industry and that will never change. That’s part of what makes the team at Yarra Web, and we’re sure many others so excited and passionate about the work that we do. Every day is an adventure and every day brings trends and technologies that continue to elevate your products and brands. Today’s post focuses on just that – the trends that are shaping up to make up the future of marketing.

First up- take a look at your data hygiene. Sounds odd doesn’t it? It’s all about quality versus quantity. Yes, data plays an increasingly large role in strategies. It shows what works and what doesn’t. It shows where your Web traffic is coming from and most importantly – who your consumer is what they need from you. But the next step is separating the quality data from the noise. There’s so much of it and you need to determine what story it will tell. Your goals and strategy as a company will focus on key performance indicators and data can help you reach success in these.

It’s also important to remember that content marketing is a meeting of right brain and left brain. It takes both art and science to bring a brand to life. You want to design your content in a way that speaks to your core consumer base and the first piece of that is data. You want to create forums for conversation with them. It’s looking at the numbers and translating them into storytelling. It’s a common misconception that you need to separate art and science, but they go hand-in-hand, depend on each other and serve as the catalysts for one another. It’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation… Which came first?

Experts know that mobile isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Our attention spans are shorter and shorter and we’re increasingly impatient. If consumers can’t find the answers that they’re looking for within minutes, you’ve lost the conversion and you’ve lost the customer. But the evolving trend is how customers use mobile. We used to type things on a keyboard, now we can speak into our phones to answer our questions and solve our needs. Google refers to I-want-to-know, I-want-to-do and I-want-to-buy micro-moments. In the Google app, more than 20% of searches now take place by voice. Another fun fact? For every second’s delay that a mobile site takes to load, conversions drop by 20%.

The final trend for today’s post is the blending of offline and online experiences. No one is saying that today’s consumer journey is linear. But it is becoming more possible to see that big picture, holistic view. Thanks to the tools available to us, we’re able to find that connection between the physical worlds, like in-store experiences, and digital capabilities.

Bottom line takeaways, using metrics strategically and finding a digital presence are paramount for your success. Questions? Comments? Let us know. The Yarra Web team would love to hear from you.