A decade ago, simply owning a business website might have been enough to secure your foothold in the digital market. You still had to be conscious of design, but there weren't nearly as many hoops to jump through to ensure your content reached your desired audience.
In 2020, online competition is only increasing, which means you need to stay up to speed on trends.
This isn't as daunting as it might initially sound. Many of the search engine optimization (SEO) practices you need to use are not that complicated and they will make a significant difference to your traffic.
Whether you're linkbuilding in The Netherlands or overhauling your UI/UX design in the US, these are the three strategies you need in 2020:
1) Optimize Your Site for Voice Searches
Optimizing for voice searches is something a lot of web designers won't even consider when launching their sites, which is precisely why it could make such a significant difference for your brand. In the digital era, smartphones aren't going out of style any time soon, so it's up to you to accommodate the way people use the internet.
In the past, we would fire a bunch of words into a search box and hope that whatever popped up was relevant to what we needed. This is how keywords first came into prominence. These days, while keywords are still important, more people are using voice commands to perform searches. This isn't just true for smartphones, but home devices too.
A good way to ensure that your site is responding to these searches is by including rhetorical questions in your web copy that a user may ask. What questions does your site answer? Include as many as you can.
2) Make Use of Linkbuilding
Linkbuilding is the term used to describe linking one website to another via a clickable hyperlink. You'll have seen many over the years as they're highly commonplace on websites. This is sometimes referred to as backlinking. This isn't a new practice, but it is essential if you're hoping to boost the number of people visiting your site.
While internal links are used when the link takes a user to another page of the same website, an external link transports a user to a separate website. External links are great for boosting your Google (News - Alert) ranking as the algorithm reads it as one website recommending another.
Linkbuilding is popular because it's easy to execute and highly effective for driving traffic. Users will click on the link because they're interested in how it relates to the previous content, or they will be interested in learning more about a product or service mentioned.
Linkbuilding is less effective when you use irrelevant links. It's important that your linkbuilding is between two related sites, if only loosely.
3) Ensure Your UI/UX is Effective for Mobile Browsing
You can adapt your site to account for voice searches, but if a mobile-user reaches your site only to find it isn't compatible with their interface, then they're going to leave pretty quickly. Your website needs to possess a design that can shift seamlessly between both desktop and mobile views.
Four out of five consumers use their mobile devices to shop online, which means that mobile design is more important than ever before. You may even want to consider investing in app design to make mobile use with customers even more convenient.
Many of the popular web hosting servers (such as Wordpress or Wix) have in-built mobile compatibility with your sites, so there really is no excuse for not providing a multi-platform interface.
