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How To Choose The Best Website Design Agency For Your Business

service@cloudcodeexperts.com (Rob Menjivar) — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 16:37:41 GMT

Guide to finding the best website design agency

Whether you are interested in launching your first website or redesigning your old one, choosing the right web design agency can make a world of difference in getting a project off the ground and building it through to fruition. Today’s modern landscape calls for websites that deliver on superb user experience, intuitive user interface coupled with speed and visual appeal. However, finding the right web design agency to deliver on your unique business goals can be daunting, given how populated the market is, which brings us to the first problem in your website project. How do you choose the right web design agency for your business?

Selecting the right web design agency that can deliver on your business goals takes into consideration multiple factors. This guide will help give you an idea of how those factors play into your decision-making process, giving you a greater idea of how a web design agency can support your business and marketing plans.

1. Determine Your Website Goals

Before you start searching for available web agencies, it’s essential for you and your team to identify the goals and objectives of your website and how they fit into your business. Ensuring your website is fully optimized and accessible for potential customers is pivotal in guaranteeing conversions and click-through rates, nurturing repeat customers and returning business. Try establishing an idea of what your website’s functions should be, who is your target audience, how the website integrates into your business’ processes etc.

Here are a few examples of what these functions might look like:

Generate leads for your busines
Sync with your CRM, like Salesforce, HubSpot, or any other major CRM software
Link with your email marketing platform, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, or Emma
E-commerce functionality; collect payments or donations, including subscription-based (recurring) payments/donations
User-friendly navigation, search-engine optimized content, and conversion-optimized pages

Your website operates as an extension of your business once you’ve identified your goals, engaging a web design agency and its developers becomes easier. As you kick off your search for a new agency you can review and vet their capabilities according to these objectives.

2. Finding and Reviewing Web Design Agencies

As you research web design agencies and engage them online or in person, your next move is to shortlist those that appear to have the best services, team structure, competitive rates that fit into your budget and portfolio - demonstrating their past work.

Three important factors to review these agencies on include experience, portfolio and client feedback. These three areas allow you to sum up if an agency can meet your goals, their standard delivery process and if they’ll be an overall good fit for your business.

Here’s a list of questions you can bake into your queries and review during your meetings:

Can I see your portfolio or a proposed mock-up of my website?

A web design agency’s portfolio is the next best way to assess their skills and capabilities. Giving you a good indication if their past productions are up to standard for your web project. Portfolios reveal creativity, industry experience, complex coding abilities, and more; allowing you to evaluate an agency not by what they say but what they actually do. Factors to consider while reviewing these portfolios include:

Do they develop mobile-friendly websites?
Do they follow the latest web design trends?
Are their designs receptive among your team?
Are they using the latest industry methods to deliver on new projects?
Do they have experience building for your industry?

Where will my website be hosted?

After receiving a great demo reel or mockup, ask them about hosting. Most website design agencies offer hosting services for client websites. You’ll need fast, powerful and stable web servers to maintain your online products. Make it a point to ask about uptime, how much time during a specified period will the website be up, this number should be above 99% and if the site happens to go down, what is the agency’s standard response procedure, getting you back online as soon as possible.

Your next set of questions can approach cases or malware and breaches, will they take care of it or will you have to deal with those issues alone? Website servers require regular, essential updates, unfortunately, they’re not always compatible with the software being used on your website, opening you up to a world of errors. Your incoming web design agency should be able to reduce such risks while offering complete peace of mind.

Do you offer Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Another point of interest is to query about their SEO services. Sadly, many business owners become engrossed with building a great website while overlooking their SEO needs. Creating a dismal state where their potential customers are unable to find them despite launching a well-crafted website for display. Your incoming website design agency will be critical in creating great SEO driven content that tells search engines what you are about with on-page and off-site SEO , so don't be afraid to ask them what strategy may be best for your business.

What About Pricing?

In many ways, your website operates as a storefront for your business and it can prove to be costly overlooking the essentials for an online presence. The best part is that approximately 74% of businesses say user experience is vital for boosting sales , emphasizing the value consumers put on web design, allowing your company to see your web design project as an investment. With the broad price range for web design projects ranging between $1,000 to more than $100,000, it’s natural to wonder what determines the cost of web design. The most influential factors contributing to your cost will include:

The size and style of your website
Copywriting services
Creating a mobile version of the website
SEO services
Custom features

Depending on what phase you’re at with your business, your website needs can equally match its size. Whether your business is small, medium or large, giving you a chance to juggle your budget. For instance, a small business like a local flower shop would do well with a basic web design offer that includes a user-friendly site that can start driving purchases, quote requests, and phone calls, allowing them to enter the online market as accessible, credible and informative at a budget-friendly price.

To scale up from a small business structure to a midsize or enterprise-grade website a client would see intermediate or enterprise web design offers that would give the company the means to advance its eCommerce structure with the use of an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) or Customer relationship management (CRM) systems and others.

Upon establishing your goals, budget and expectations you can also anticipate additional benefits from formalizing your relationship with a web design agency for your project. Including readily accessible support, legally binding contracts, and in the long term in-depth knowledge of the website along with its code and compatible software.

If you require more details on building a web project with Cloud Code Experts we can provide you with custom quote here .

Alternatives To Web Agencies

Alternatively, there are a number of freemium website builders available for use by business owners such as Wix and Squarespace . With the cost of a monthly plan ranging from $14 - $500, these platforms allow an average person to design a site by dragging and dropping content. Website builders are designed for people with little to no technical skills giving them the independence to create user-friendly interface design, text, and upload images using a variety of templates. However, they can prove to be limited on various fronts including poor SEO, slow loading times, limited pages and professional features.

Are Freelancers More Cost-Effective?

A s you weigh up your budget and research alternatives, you might come across freelance web developers offering their services. This can be a great option for you if the freelancer can deliver on your specified goals. Freelance web developers are typically more flexible, accommodating different project management timelines and contract lengths. On average a freelancer may charge based on their location, with those overseas charging $15- $50 per hour compared to stateside freelancers charging higher rates

O n the other hand, freelancers come with their own shortcomings such as failing to deliver on a project or being unable to meet your standard for deliverables. In such cases, you’ll have to determine your route to recourse, whether revision or refund. Another fallback to freelance developers comes from the nature of short term engagements, often upon completing a project clients might lose out on long term maintenance and support.

A lternatively while hiring an agency is more expensive they usually have the manpower to handle all aspects of the website design and development project. By using a web design agency client will benefit from the collective experience of the website developer team.

Cloud Code Experts is an experienced web design agency.

N ow that you’re familiar with what it takes to choose the right web design agency for your business, we'd like to invite you to put us to the test.

A t Cloud Code Experts we know what it takes to help a business grow through its online website and SEO efforts. We ensure our clients benefit from their investment by building out products that meet their goals of increased traffic, customers, and revenue.

Ready to meet your goals?

R equest a free quote or contact us today to get started with your custom web design project!

5 SEO Optimization Tips To Help Grow Your Business

service@cloudcodeexperts.com (Rob Menjivar) — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 12:22:04 GMT

Whether you’re a long time seller or pivoting into the eCommerce space, small and medium-sized businesses that effectively work SEO optimization techniques into their online business strategies reap high-level returns for positioning their brand. Improving their site’s discoverability, driving relevance among their audience that ultimately leads to new sales.

Given the fact that online shopping has become one of the most popular online activities worldwide, businesses that overlook engaging their online customers not only miss out on closing a sale but also a cut of revenues running into trillions of dollars. In 2020, retail e-commerce sales worldwide amounted to 4.28 trillion US dollars and e-retail revenues are projected to grow to 5.4 trillion US dollars in 2022.

Below we’ll examine 5 SEO optimization tips to maximize your websites’ potential in driving free, recurring, high-converting traffic, taking your business to the next level.

If you find yourself struggling to implement these suggestions, call us today at 703-988-5039 to speak with a consultant about how Cloud Code Experts can help.

If you’re a local in Virginia that needs SEO services, troubleshooting a campaign or want to remote in about a project, Cloud Code Experts can help, leave us a message about your project anytime here .

How SEO Fits Into Your Business

Search Engine Optimization- SEO pulls together a combination of strategies giving focus to keywords and activities that improves your website’s visibility on search engines. These keywords help customers find your website when they use Google, Bing, Yahoo etc when they enter keywords relevant to your business.

On the technical side, search engines peruse billions of websites and content, measuring multiple factors to determine which content is most likely to answer a customer’s query. Cataloguing web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process referred to as “ranking.”

Here’s how you can score SEO points and get in front of the right customers through organic search:

1.Keyword optimization

Keywords are the cornerstone of your SEO optimization strategy, without keywords your prospective customers may never find you. While figuring out the right keywords to associate with your website and content, you’ll need to simultaneously conduct keyword research.

There are a number of keyword research tools that will help you choose the right keywords such as Google AdWords. By using Google AdWords , and other planning tools you can validate that the keywords you chose are frequently used in online searches.

It’s also wise for you to work in long-tail keywords. These are keywords that contain three or more words, typically they have higher conversion rates because they don’t have as high of a search volume to short-tail keywords which typically consist of one-two keywords. This means there is less competition from other brands. Try putting these long-tail keywords in your products’ names and their descriptions.

An example of a long-tail keyword is “Pediatrician in Palm Bay, FL” compared to a short-tail keyword like “pediatrician”

Someone searching for “Pediatrician in Palm Bay, FL” is likely searching for a local office to visit or engage, hence why these types of long-tail keywords drive in traffic that is credible and valuable to a business.

Once you’ve settled with your keywords of choice your next step is to integrate these keywords into places that the search engine will crawl including headings, titles, meta descriptions, and body text of your pages. This will help your page rank better for those keywords.

As you integrate keywords, be careful not to overdo them. This can lead to keyword stuffing , which negatively impacts your ranking.

2.Build A Website That Performs

It’s important that when building or refreshing your website’s design you and your team take the time to do proper SEO work. While it might appear overwhelming, breaking down SEO strategies into simple actionable tasks allows you to tackle each element consistently.

By breaking SEO down into specific problems that need to be solved, you can make sure that your website follows best practices while helping you to achieve your online business goals. By incorporating these best practices and staying on top of Google's algorithm updates allows search engines to maintain and increase your business website's rankings, leads, and conversion rates.

3.Publish Relevant Content

When potential customers scan the web for information about a product or service similar to what you offer, they'll likely come across social media posts, blogs, web pages, and other pieces of content that can help solve their queries, in the eCommerce space this can stimulate a purchasing decision. When teams work to have the most relevant, engaging and authoritative content on a topic or product this gives prospects a chance to build trust, converting leads into customers. These content types can take on many forms, and your goal should be cultivating and creating content in a variety of them, including:

Blogs
Video (which can boost organic search results by 50 times more than text-based content)
Infographics
Podcasts
Animations
User-generated content
Guest blogs
E-books and whitepapers
How-to guides
Lists
Product reviews

4.Use Visual Content

Zoning in on content types that improve your SEO ranking, visual content like images and videos give your business a unique advantage. Search engines are not only crawling text on a given page, but they’re also scanning for other media types and use these other media types to determine if your page is informative, therefore a mixture of not only text but also quality visuals like images and videos, makes your page more valuable and perceived as informative—thus giving a boost to your SEO efforts.

In order to get the best possible SEO value out of your images, you need to use appropriate labeling techniques. This is particularly useful for eCommerce websites that display product listings. For example, take the image of the blue sneaker below.

I t’s commonplace to upload an image of products for sale on your online store giving your users an overall shopping experience however many store owners default to uploading the numeric or generic name of the photo, e.g "18875524_1.png", generating limited value in search because it doesn't identify what the image is in the filename.

C onsider renaming product files to be more descriptive such as “blue-fitness-sneaker-shoes.png," and add an appropriate image alt tag like: "Blue Fitness and Track Shoes For Women and Girls", your image may rank well when people are doing image searches. Naming your images appropriately and labeling them with img alt tags provides another point of entry to your website for users looking using Google Image search and others platforms.

A nother avenue for visual content can come from creating and embedding optimized YouTube videos into your website. Videos are particularly useful in pulling in organic traffic while improving your website’s user experience. Including video with highly relevant keyword titles along with a detailed text description helps to increase your exposure in search engine results pages.

A nother useful tip is to include links back to your site within the description text of your videos, this will open up your funnel for new sources of referral traffic. For many, YouTube acts as the second largest search engine after Google.

O n a related note, quality backlinks are one of the critical factors that Google uses to determine search engine rankings. The more people that are linking to your content and to your domain, the more authority you are seen as having.

5.Use Social For Backlinks

If you want to help your site improve its SEO ranking, you need to earn backlinks. Backlinks are a crucial part of SEO optimization. These are links that your business obtains from other credible sites from across the internet. An interesting pull for modern SEO comes from social media, and this is because an increasing number of consumers are turning to these platforms to engage with brands. Nearly 80 percent of people turn to Facebook when they want to find interesting content, and this means there's a huge opportunity there for you to reach new audiences, attract more prospects, and develop lasting relationships with customers.

Get started today

If you’re ready to start working on your web projects’ SEO and start earning more valuable traffic and leads through a customized SEO plan , connect with us online or call us today at 703-988-5039 . Looking forward to helping your online business grow!