Did you know 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine? That means if someone is looking for your content, you practically don’t exist if you don’t have a website. But it’s not sufficient to just have a website — it should be an audience attraction hub designed with website best practices in mind.
A well-designed web page will be a captivating storefront, enticing potential followers and converting casual visitors into loyal advocates. But how can you design your web page to achieve this remarkable feat?
In this guide, we will unveil the secrets to creating an effective web page that will skyrocket your brand’s visibility, engagement, and, ultimately, profits.
Understanding Your Target Audience
Your target audience is the group of people who are interested in your brand and business. These people will influence everything you do, including the content you create and your marketing campaign. But finding target customers is only half the battle.
Your target audience is the group you'll be investing resources into to attract and convert into customers. This includes financial resources spent on marketing campaigns, product development, customer service, and more that are specifically tailored to this group. Therefore, it's essential that you define and understand your target audience as accurately and in as much detail as possible. Knowing their needs, pain points, and preferences allows you to focus your resources more effectively and increase your chances of successfully converting them into loyal customers.
So, when defining your target audience, consider the following:
- Which individuals will derive the greatest advantages from your product or service?
- What are the reasons they require your product or service?
- Which individuals will interact with or utilize your product or service?
- In what ways does your product or service surpass those offered by competitors, making it more beneficial for your target audience?
But how do you dive even deeper into understanding your customers' needs? This is where creating buyer personas comes in. By building buyer personas, you create detailed profiles that vividly depict your target customers.
These personas encompass aspects, such as your audience’s age, what they love, the social media platforms they use, and more. Focus groups, surveys, and other market research tools are invaluable resources for constructing these personas and gaining clarity on your target audience.
Setting Clear Goals for Your Web Page
You can’t design a winning website without a clear purpose in mind. To define the purpose, you should ask yourself the following questions:
- What do you want your web page to accomplish?
- What specific action do you want your target audience to take after visiting your web page?
- How does your web page fit into your overall marketing strategy?
- What type of information or content should your web page include to achieve your goals?
The answers will serve as your North Star, guiding you toward designing a web page that delivers remarkable results. There are several goals you could be aiming for with your webpage. Some examples include:
- Generating leads: This goal means you will be using your web page as a magnet, capturing the contact information of potential leads who are genuinely interested in your company's products or services.
- Educating prospects: The goal is to give your audience insights, tips, and answers to their burning questions about your brand’s offerings.
- Showcasing your work: Display your company's expertise and past work in all its glory, proving beyond a doubt that you're the real deal.
- Encourage sign-ups or subscriptions: Transform your web page into a charismatic speaker, persuading visitors to take action. Whether it's signing up for a free trial, requesting a demo, or subscribing to your company's newsletter, make it irresistible for them to join your vibrant community.
But it doesn't stop there. You should ensure your goals are SMART and perfectly aligned with your target audience's needs.
SMART means that the goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Be crystal clear about what you want to achieve, set milestones to track progress, and ensure that your goals are realistic and aligned with your overall business objectives.
Crafting Compelling Copy
Crafting compelling copy is like adding a touch of magic to your web page, making it an irresistible marketing tool. It's what makes your audience stop, read, and take action. If you’re wondering how to write good website copy, here are a few tips:
Writing Clear and Concise Headlines
Your headline is the first impression you make on your audience. So, ensure the headlines grab your audience's attention and entice them to explore further. A clear and concise headline makes it easy for them to grasp the main point quickly.
Creating Engaging Content
This part is where you unleash your creativity and create content that keeps your audience hooked from start to finish. Whether it's informative blog posts, compelling product descriptions, or captivating videos, make sure your content speaks directly to your target audience.
Use these tips to ensure your content is engaging:
- Tell captivating stories
- Use compelling visuals
- Keep it concise and break up the text with subheadings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to make it scannable
- Engage with your audience
- Provide valuable insights and solutions
Don't just inform; captivate! Be the guide that takes your visitors on an unforgettable journey through your web page.
Highlighting Your Unique Value Proposition
What sets you apart from the competition? Your web page is the perfect place to showcase this unique value proposition. Communicate what makes your products or services special, highlighting the benefits your audience can't find elsewhere.
Incorporating Social Proof
Humans are social creatures, and we tend to trust what others say. Bring out the big guns of social proof to supercharge your web page's effectiveness. Display client work, feature logos of well-known companies you've worked with, and provide links to case studies or social testimonials.
Designing an Attractive and User-Friendly Web Page
Designing an eye-catching and user-friendly web page is like crafting a work of art that captivates your audience. Let's explore the key steps that will make your web page a visual masterpiece and an effective marketing tool:
Choosing the Right Color Scheme and Fonts
Colors and fonts are the building blocks of visual appeal. Opt for a color scheme that aligns with your brand identity and evokes the desired emotions. You should also choose fonts that are easy to read and reflect your brand's personality.
With Norby, you can customize your page’s appearance to make it look and feel like you. You can choose everything, including colors, backgrounds, fonts, and borders. Norby supports various Google fonts to choose from or you can upload your desired font via the appearance tab.
Creating a Responsive Design for Different Devices
Your web page should adapt seamlessly to various devices, from desktops to smartphones and tablets. This ensures that users have a consistent and enjoyable experience, regardless of their device.
Norby takes care of every aspect of responsive design and ensures that pages are responsive for laptops, tablets, and other mobile devices. The pages are mobile-optimized, so users can access everything on your website using their phones. You can see a preview of your website’s laptop and mobile design when building your pages in Norby.
Incorporating Multimedia Elements
Make your web page an interactive playground by adding multimedia elements. GIFs, YouTube or Vimeo embeds, and Spotify widgets can elevate the user experience and keep visitors engaged for a long time. You can embed captivating multimedia elements that showcase your work, products, or services.
Incorporating Lead Capture Forms
Your website should have lead capture forms if you want it to be an effective marketing tool. By strategically placing these forms in key locations, you can build your email and SMS lists, which are invaluable resources for your business. Your email and SMS lists provide a direct line of communication with your audience.
Optimizing website for leads
To start building your list, leverage your top social channel to post captivating content that entices followers to visit your profile. Once they are on your page, give them something valuable, such as a one-pager or a digital product, to engage them further.
Use the link in your bio to collect your desired first-party data every time your profile visitor clicks on the link. You’ll need this data to send personalized campaigns to nurture individuals who have expressed interest in your brand.
The disadvantage of relying on social media platforms to collect first-party data is that you’re at the mercy of the platforms’ algorithms when serving your content. These algorithms determine what content is shown to users, so your reach may be limited. You also surrender data control to the social media platform you’re using.
This is where Norby becomes a game-changer by allowing you to collect first-party data without relying on social media. You can use Norby Signups forms to collect your desired data, such as name, phone number, and email handles. You can also choose keyword signups, where users can opt-in by texting a specific keyword to a designated number.
So what goes into creating website lead magnets that work? The answer is to make the lead magnet irresistible by ensuring it’s valuable, easily accessible, and relevant to your audience.
For your lead magnet to check all of these boxes, you should consider the following best practices:
- Consider your target audience: Consider who they are, their interests, and why they choose you over others. It’s the only way to create a lead magnet relevant to them.
- Optimize your lead capture forms: Ensure the forms include all the relevant fields to help you gather as much data as possible to create a more targeted campaign. You can use Norby Signups to create custom fields targeting all the relevant data.
- Offer valuable content in exchange for contact information: Entice your audience by offering them valuable content they can't resist. It could be a list of your highly-rated and popular podcast episodes, an exclusive invitation to a workshop or live event, or bonus content like a useful template.
Leveraging SEO Best Practices
Your website is nothing if it remains hidden in the vast abyss of the internet. And there’s no better way to make it visible to your online community than by optimizing it for search engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ensures your website is visible to search crawlers. In turn, you get more traffic, which translates into more opportunities to convert your customers. Optimizing your website for leads is vital because it helps you appear at the top of search engine results and outdo competitors.
Here are some of the best SEO practices to incorporate into your web design:
Conducting Keyword Research
Identify the keywords and phrases your target audience uses to search for products or services related to your business.
Optimizing On-Page Elements
This part involves strategically improving specific elements within a web page to enhance its visibility and relevance to search engines. Some of the on-page elements you should optimize include:
- Page URL: A well-structured URL helps search engines and users understand the context of your page. As such, your URLs should be readable and contain relevant keywords that accurately reflect the content of your page.
- Title: The title tags appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) to give readers a preview of your page, and most mobile browsers will display 50-60 characters. Thus, ensure that your title tags are concise and contain relevant keywords. Plus, be sure to structure your web page content using header tags (H1, H2, and H3).
- Meta descriptions: These are the content snippets that appear below your title tags in a SERP or on social media when you share your page’s URL. You should keep it short and incorporate the right keywords to entice users to click through to your page.
- Image optimization: Upload images to your page and optimize them using descriptive file names with relevant keywords. Compress the images to ensure fast loading times, as page speed is a ranking factor.
- Keyword usage: Incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout your web page's content. However, avoid keyword stuffing, as it can harm your rankings.
While on-page optimization sounds complicated, Norby makes it all a breeze. With Norby, you only need to use the landing page editor to add all the information about your page, including the title, description, and keywords.
You can edit these elements on all the pages you build using Norby. You can also preview the image that will be displayed in link previews and when you share your page’s URL on social media.
Once your page is optimized, your next step should be getting backlinks. Share your Norby page across your social media platforms and other sites to generate backlinks and drive traffic to your web page.
Implement Website Best Practices to Grow Your Brand
Your website is the best marketing tool at your disposal. However, to unlock its full potential as an effective marketing tool, you should embrace website best practices that transform it into a captivating and high-performing asset. If you’re ready to transform your web page into a marketing powerhouse, use Norby.
Our platform has all the features you need to customize your web page and make it attractive and responsive. It also has features to help you gather first-party data and optimize your pages. Check out Norby’s resources for creative entrepreneurs for more tips on how to grow your brand.
