4 Latest Website Design Trends for Future Businesses

Web design trends come and go. But some have lasting impacts on the online success of your business.

Knowing the latest trends determines how you should invest your web design efforts to meet business objectives and improve how users experience your brand.

As mobile takes a greater share of user activity, designers must adapt to meet the needs of those users and the devices and channels being used.

Having a responsive website isn’t enough to keep your business at the top of your industry, search engine results, or the minds of your customers.

Put Mobile First

With the advent of smartphones, tablets, and wearable technology, web designers now work within many different contexts. Each has its own unique way of accessing and sharing information about your products and services.

Some businesses prioritize desktop design over mobile. This compromises the user experience and can make your website clunky and difficult to navigate on a smartphone or tablet.

Emphasizing mobile design first is the ideal way to develop a successful business website.

More Speed For Less Friction

The growth of mobile also influences how users navigate through your site. Designers are implementing larger buttons that are easier to click on small devices.

Users who are more familiar with touchscreen technology understand sites that use gestures in place of traditional link. This has led to a reduction in the use of links and other elements on a site’s page.

Longer pages that users can scroll through are better suited for mobile users and are becoming the standard in modern web design.

The use of scrolling and other gestures reduces user friction and is the best way to help users engage with your site.

With the introduction of the Apple watch and other wearable technology, a faster interface is critical in designing websites for the future.

Information Security

Recent hacking incidents compromised the information of businesses, their employees, and their customers. This has led to an increased need for security when customers engage with your business.

Future web design will emphasize greater security alongside the payment process, forms, and customer communications of businesses.

The information customers provide is vital to meeting long-term objectives and improving retention.

Minimal Design

A simple and functional web design lets users understand the layout, content, and features of your site.

Websites that are scannable help users determine your value proposition quickly and easily. This reduces bounce rates and improves conversion.

Technology is getting faster, and users have less patience with sites that are difficult to understand in a short amount of time.

Designs with unnecessary clutter are just as detrimental to performance as those with a slow loading rate or other issues.

Users land on your content from a variety of channels, each with its own unique implications on the design of your site.

Put yourself in the mind of your customers to determine how to make your site simple to understand and respond to your call to action.

The growth of mobile and its influence on web design will continue to evolve. By implementing the most effective design strategies, businesses leverage their sites for greater returns.

Let us know if you’ve used any of these strategies in your own business strategy. If you’re still struggling to understand how to keep your website current using the latest design trends, leave a comment below.

The New World of the SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) looks a lot different these days. Many of the fundamental principles that help you gain better rankings are still relevant.

But today’s SEO professional must consider new aspects of their clients’ businesses to ensure long-term success.

The following will highlight some of the ways you can change your approach to your SEO strategy, the questions you should seek to answer, and the benefits you can gain through their implementation.

The SEO You Know

The typical SEO approach starts with the audit. This is where you review a business website to understand what elements might be corrected for improved performance.

The audit is a great opportunity to see the possibilities for developing a more effective strategy.

In the past, the SEO was primarily concerned with keyword optimization. This allowed them to develop content that targets these keywords and generate relevant links along the way. But many saw this as a quick fix.

In today’s market, this approach isn’t enough, and it fails to take advantage of many of the tools that are available.

A New Perspective

Taking a new perspective ensures that your SEO strategy is comprehensive and meets the needs of your business.

The SEO professional of today must have the information to evolve the methods used to increase and maintain search engine rankings.

This requires a full understanding of the current needs of the business. You can get clear on this by asking some key questions that are vital to almost any business:

What does the business want to accomplish?

What marketing goals are the most important right now?

What are the short- and long-term goals of the business?

Digging deeper into the business improves the auditing process and prevents it from only addressing issues related to tools and tactics.

Instead, the SEO must focus on needs, goals, and strategy.

Putting it Into Practice

The first step to putting this new approach into practice is to decide how an SEO can maximize the tools that are available to the business in light of the answers to these questions. This allows you to assess the possibilities and create a priority to list from where to begin.

You must recognize that underneath all of the data, analytics, and rankings are real customers. The first step is to understand these customers throughout their different segments.

Certain customers will respond to specific keywords or content. Understanding these segments allows you to target each one accordingly. This includes those individuals who are most likely to influence a given segment through sharing information or linking to your product or service.

From there, you can begin to market the content in a way that falls in line with the information you’ve gathered on business goals and customer interests.

This content can come in a variety of forms and be shared through social media, email, or other distribution channels.

Finally, you must learn from feedback. It’s not enough to implement this strategy. It’s essential that you also explore why something worked (or didn’t).

This is the new world of the SEO. The tactics and tools that worked in developing SEO strategies of the past must now be developed with a new perspective. This means that businesses must consider their goals and customer behaviors.

What new approaches to your SEO strategy are you using to increase your search engine rankings. Let us know how they’ve worked for you in the comments section.

Is Duplicate Content Hurting Your SEO?

Duplicate content is a misunderstood issue. As more publishing platforms develop across a wide range of channels, it’s easy for content to appear in more than one place.

Conventional wisdom has always stated that duplicate content is inherently a bad thing. Indeed, search engines like Google have certain restrictions and policies in place to deal with duplicate content.

But knowing what duplicate content its, how it can affect search, and what you can do about it will ensure that your content is where it needs to be for maximum visibility and SEO results.

What is Duplicate Content?

Content is considered to as duplicate when it is shared by more than one page. For example, a guest blog post that also appears on the writer’s own website may be viewed as a duplicate.

But there are three main classifications of duplicate content that will give you a better understanding of how to identify it:

Cross-domain duplicates

Near duplicates

True duplicates

A cross-domain duplicate can occur when two distinct websites share identical pieces of content, such as the guest blog post example above.

Near duplicates occur when only a portion of one piece of content also exists on a second page. This includes images and text, and can often occur in in ecommerce product pages and catalogs.

But when the entire content is the same as that of another page on a separate URL, this is known as a true duplicate.

The Impact of Duplicate Content

Search engines try to manage duplicate content in order to provide the best results for their users. Search crawlers consider any unique URL as a distinct page. In many cases, more than one URL will lead to the same content. This can be intentional or unintentional.

When it is intentional, it’s most likely in an attempt to manipulate the rankings on search pages and gain a higher level of traffic. But this can negatively impact the experience of search engine users.

When this occurs, search engines can penalize sites and lower their rankings. This is done in order to ensure that they not show the exact same content repeated in their search listings.

What to Do About Duplicate Content

There are a number of ways to deal with duplicate content. Once you've identified what URLs share existing content, you can use such things as a 301 redirect, rel=canonical tag, and “noindex, follow” avoid any penalty.

The 301 redirect is important when you've identified a higher page authority for one URL. The redirect will remove any unwanted competition with the other page on SERPs.

Using the rel=canonical tag is a less time-intensive method. By adding this tag to the head of your page, you essentially let the search engines know that it is a copy of another “original” page.

The following is an example of what that would look like:

<head><link rel=”canonical” href=”original URL” /></head>

You can also use the “noindex, follow” to address duplicate content. It notifies the search engines that a given duplicate page should not be indexed.

Add “noindex, follow” to your meta robots tag as follows:

<head><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” /></head>

Understanding what duplicate content is and the ways in which you can avoid its impact on your SEO will ensure that you maintain rankings while getting the most visibility for your content and business.

If you still have questions about duplicate content and how to address it, let us know in the comments below.