Website development takes a lot of time and effort. From planning the updates to implementation, the time required could be so heavy that it ends up distracting from your business operations, goals, and initiatives.
However, the long-term benefits of investing in your website development are endless! Not only does a well-planned and designed website enhance user experience, but it also has the ability to reap incredible ROI for your business. Your website is like your business’ storefront - attracting customers with targeted messaging, engaging those customers with helpful content, and delighting them with thoughtful conversion funnels.
Don’t sleep on the benefits of an excellent website. Keep reading to explore four reasons why web development, and the help of a web developer, is key to scaling your marketing and sales efforts.
Building a website from scratch, or conducting a site refresh, certainly requires a heavy time investment from your team. Hours of work go into the site’s planning, build, and execution. You may be tempted to keep the web dev work in-house, but there are many advantages to outsourcing the project to a professional web developer.
Hiring a web developer is cost-efficient. It’s cheaper than hiring several salaried employees on your team to carry out the project. There is also the benefit of a web developer’s experience, expertise, and outside perspective to develop a compelling narrative for your site.
A web developer will also focus on all the necessary technical elements to ensure your website runs smoothly, like hosting to make sure your website works fast and is responsive across devices. Expert hosting setup enables higher page scores for SEO, a fast site, and an excellent user experience. A web developer will also alert your team to any evolving web technologies that would ensure your site doesn’t fall behind current best practices in order to stay ahead of ever-evolving website best practices.
Lastly, hiring an outside web developer allows your team to focus on moving your business forward. With the technicalities of the website build in their hands, you now have the time and bandwidth to dedicate to growing and scaling your business.
One of the main reasons you are looking to build a new website or refresh your current site is because you want to create a compelling and engaging site for your audience. Building a site that is on-brand, user-friendly, and is built with your marketing and sales goals in mind is tough business.
A web developer has the expertise to create a custom website for your business that will stand out from the competition and all the templated do-it-yourself web options out there. Not only will your custom website be on brand, but it will also be unique and instantly attract your audience with its professionalism and thoughtful design, increasing your business’ credibility.
Additionally, working with a web developer on a custom website allows you to control each aspect of your site’s design and functionality. From color palettes and typography to site architecture and a buyer’s journey, you can work with your web developer to build a website that is in line with your audience.
One of the most important factors to increasing your website’s visibility in search engines and in driving more traffic to your site is user experience. Not only will user experience and functionality affect your SEO rankings, but it will also compel (or repel) visitors to choose your business versus the competition.
An expert web developer can help you set up technicalities on your website to ensure a positive experience. For example, Google page experience signals measure how a website user perceives his or her interaction with the web page. Setting this up provides you access to core web vitals like mobile-friendliness and cumulative layout shift, which will be added to Google’s page ranking factors starting May 2021.
Addressing SEO technicalities on your site to improve user experience is important. But, user experience goes so much deeper. Work with your web developer to consider the architecture of your website and how you want users to interact with each page. Additionally, consider the entire inbound marketing funnel and how you can make use of calls to action and pop-up forms on your site to move visitors into leads down your funnel.
SEO, or search engine optimization, is an ongoing process to ensure your website is optimized for the search results of your target audience. Your site needs to be built with performance and speed in mind so that it’s easy for search engines to index your site and understand the content on your website.
Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to better understand what users are searching for and what results would best fit their needs. Thus, optimizing your website to increase your pages’ rankings and improve your results in search engines is an important and ongoing process.
A web developer offers your business the opportunity to work with someone in tune with the latest updates to SEO algorithms and existing knowledge of your business and website. He or she has the ability to monitor your site’s content and functionality on a regular basis and offer up solutions to improve site functionality or incorporate keyword-rich content on your website to boost rankings and ultimately grow your business's digital marketing online.
Web development may seem like a lofty undertaking for your business. From cost to time commitment, the effort required is no small task. However, the long-term marketing benefits of a beautifully designed and high-functioning website are hard to discount. After all, a website is like your business’ storefront and is crucial to attracting, engaging, and converting visitors into customers.