For businesses, the entire purpose of building a site is to ensure their website visitors turn into customers.

You can have a visually-pleasing business website that is receiving tons of traffic, but if you are not successfully turning these visitors into customers, the dollars you spend on your marketing, design & development are totally worthless.

There are a lot of aspects of web design that play an important role in whether you are successfully converting visitors into leads or not. Even the smallest detail could be the difference between your potential customers becoming paying customers for your competitors.

If you want to craft a site with high conversions, you need to keep the following components in mind:

1. Use Responsive Layout for Larger Screen Size

Most people today prefer to use smartphones rather than traditional computers or laptops for their basic Web needs. Web designers began opting for responsive web design, because device screens were getting smaller.

But now, there is another reason why they need to choose to design responsive websites; screens are also becoming bigger.

With explosive adoption of various types of large-screen Internet enabled devices like smart TVs, gaming consoles, etc. hitting the market, it is imperative for web designers to embrace responsive layouts.

Young Families Connect’s website incorporates a responsive layout that ensures the same optimal experience for users browsing the site on a 55 inch smart TV, 14 inch laptop and 6 inch smartphone.

2.  Optimize Website for Search Engine Spiders

This is one of the best ways to boost your site’s conversion rates.

See our SEO tips here: SEO Rules, On-Page SEO Techniques, How to Rank #1 on Google,

All web designers are aware of the fact that ranking high on SERPs will bring more qualified traffic to the site; traffic that has a high chance of converting. Ranking higher on SERPs compared to your competitors will make potential customers click on your link.

To rank higher on search engines like Google and Bing, web designers must craft the site in such a way that it provides a highly satisfying UX to visitors by ensuring the site load time is less, the site has attractive visuals, and by adding keywords to meta tags, etc.

3.  Offer User-Friendly and Intuitive Site Navigation

Visitors abandon a site even if it is aesthetically appealing, content-rich, mobile-friendly and SEO optimized. What could possibly be the reason behind it?

The answer – Navigation!

Studies show poor navigation is one of the primary reasons behind a website losing its customers. If the navigation of your site is not properly designed and organized, visitors will undoubtedly abandon the site. This bounce rate will have a huge negative impact on your search rankings.

So, it is imperative for web designers to craft navigation that is easy-to-use and intuitive.

Apple’s website offers well-constructed and user-friendly navigation to its visitors.

4.  Appear Trustworthy and Transparent

Would you buy from someone whom you don’t trust?

Trust is an important factor for a business, if it wants to climb the ladder of success and this is even truer in the online world. People take a fraction of second to form an opinion about your website.

So, in this limited amount of time, how can you ensure that you come across as a legitimate and reliable business?

Some of the better ways to appear professional and reputable to your visitors is by prominently displaying testimonials or number of customers served, adding privacy trust seals, displaying live twitter feed etc. on your site. Credibility will ultimately improve the sales of your business.

Take a cue from SendGrid on how to appear professional and trustworthy to your potential customers.

Another great way of making a site appear trustworthy is to have transparent policies. Provide all the necessary details like return policy, privacy policy, etc. clearly and ensure your visitors can easily locate this information on the site.

5.  Incorporate Social Media

This seems like a no-brainer. In the last few years, social media usage has skyrocketed. You must be putting in a lot of effort to have an active presence on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other relevant social platforms. To get maximum benefit from your presence on these social channels, however, it is extremely important that your business website points to these channels.

To get tangible results from social media, you must add a Facebook link or plugin that shows visitors which of their friends like your site. Furthermore, ensure social media buttons remain easily accessible on all the pages of your site.

Social media icons on Pepsico website appear on a horizontal menu bar at the bottom of the page that keeps following the visitor as he scrolls down the site.

6.  Design Call-to-Action Buttons That Get Clicked

Web designers are well-aware of the fact that call-to-action buttons play a mission critical role in converting a visitor into a customer. But surprisingly, even today, we come across many websites that are designed with unclear calls-to-action. As can be imagined, this has a significant negative impact on their conversions.

So, it is imperative for web designers to craft compelling CTAs by focusing on essential elements of these buttons like size, color, position, shape and text. Ensure CTAs of your website are consistent throughout all web pages.

The design of all the CTA buttons on ‘Nite Watches’ website is brilliant!

7.  Easily Accessible Contact Information

Assume a situation: A potential customer visited your site which is visually appealing, user-friendly and provides all relevant information the customer is looking for. Now, being thoroughly impressed with your site, he is all set to do business with you and wants to get in touch. But he can’t locate information like your email address, phone number or address of the office to contact you anywhere on the site. This has left him with no option, but to turn to your competitors!

To ensure you don’t make such a mistake, make all contact information readily accessible for your visitors.

Metta Skincare prominently gives a link to all their contact information on the homepage.

8.  Incorporate Google Maps (or similar)

As discussed in an earlier point, consumers today are using their smartphones for their basic Web needs, which even includes doing product research and finding out the address of a company. Most people use their mobile phone as a GPS.

Embedding Google Maps or similar on your website will not only help potential customers easily locate your business’s physical location, but also help your business rank well in the Google+ Local business listings. This will definitely make more local potential customers land up on your site; and more qualified traffic means more conversions.

Lobagola’s website is a perfect example of how businesses especially in the hotel industry must embed Maps in the site to help tourists locate the physical location easily.

While there are many components that contribute towards effective website design, these 8 elements should be a fundamental part of your conversion optimization strategy. Have any further tips to add?

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Michael Georgiou is a dynamic business professional and entrepreneurial guru associated with Imaginovation – a Raleigh Website Design company.