Do you have a phone book in your home or office? If so, when was the last time you used it to find a phone number. If you cannot remember, then you are like 70% of the people surveyed by Harris Interactive who said they rarely or never use a phone book. Instead, these people choose to go on the internet and use a search engine like Google to find the information they are searching for. Therefore, your company needs to have a site with optimal web design and development.
Web design and development is important for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, is the fact that nearly half of all people determine a business’ credibility based upon their website and 40% of people abandon a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If your site takes more than four seconds to load, then the bounce back rate jumps to 100% and if a page takes eight seconds or more to load the bounce back rate jumps to 150%. Therefore, you want an internet presence that is both an aesthetically pleasing website and has a responsive website design.
Another quality that your web design and development should include is SEO or search engine optimization in order to bump it up to the top of a Google Search. When you optimize your website, it is more likely to result in an organic click. This is based on a study done by Chitika, an online ad network, which found that the top listing in Google’s organic search results receives just over 30% of traffic. The result that occurs in the second position receives almost 20% and the traffic only degrades from there. In addition, it has been found that more that 75% of people never go past the first page of results on Google and nearly the same amount of people ignore the ads and prefer to look at the organic results.
Furthermore, SEO leads have a close rate of almost 15% while outbound leads like direct mail and print advertising have a close rate under 2%. SEO leads are also more than 60% cheaper than outbound leads such as cold calls. However, in order to use SEO, one has to be aware that Google and other search engines are constantly changing algorithms. Google has been known to change its algorithms up to 600 times a year, or almost twice a day.
Your company’s web design and development should also include a website specifically for mobile devices. This is due to the fact that over 60% of the businesses who invested in a mobile site increased sales. This number is expected to rise with the amount of people who own smartphones and do searches on them. However, those that used a smartphone to get to a website and found that it was not working well felt that the company did not care and looked elsewhere. It is unknown how many of the 100 billion searches that are done each month around the world are done on smart devices. However, it is known that over 90% of all internet experiences begin with a search on a search engine.
When enquiring about professional web design and development, be sure to ask about customer experience, as well as custom design and eye-catching design. This way, your company will be part of the increasing number of businesses that are spending more to improve client encounters. This number has increased in recent years, up from almost 50% in 2011 to over 60% last year.
