The key principle of Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is to ensure your website is constantly growing. But growing doesn’t simply mean adding web page on web page just to make your website is bigger than it was before.
Growing is about doing things better.
This blog will identify exactly why you might need Growth-Driven Design as a website development strategy for the rest of 2019.
GDD is all about building and developing a website that is:
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Always up to date;
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Optimised for search engines as well as website visitors;
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Full of high-quality content;
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Regularly updated and improved based on analytics;
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And constantly growing.
But how do you know it’s time to redesign your website for growth?
In this blog, we’ll outline five key reasons why you should redesign your website using GDD.
1. Your website is not generating enough – or any – leads
If you haven’t made changes to your website in over six months, and your lead volume has been decreasing over the same period – you should be considering what changes need to be made.
First and foremost, find out which pages on your website generate the most traffic and leads. If you have analytics in place or your CMS supports data capture, you should be able to easily identify them. Having identified them, work out how to improve them. This might mean updating the content on them or including more calls-to-action (CTAs) to drive conversions. The improvements you make to your top-performing web pages will enable you to improve the conversion rate of your website as a whole.
By taking a growth-driven approach to your website’s design and development, you can not only identify the areas of your site that are generating traffic and new leads and optimise them, but also identify those that are not performing and improve them.
2. Your organic traffic isn’t increasing month-on-month
Part of growing your website is content creation – and it’s fundamental to any GDD strategy. You should have a content strategy or plan that outlines what content you will create and when it will be published.
By regularly creating content that is search engine optimised and tailored to your buyer personas, you can increase your website’s organic traffic and capture the attention of your target audience.
So low organic search traffic is another reason to invest in Growth-Driven Design. Done properly, GDD will ensure you continuously improve your web pages – helping to generate more high-quality leads in the process – and that you regularly create content to increase organic traffic and your website’s domain authority.
3. You want a new website and you want it FAST
If you’re thinking about using growth-driven design for your next website build, one key advantage is that you quickly get a website which is better than the one you currently have.
How does that work?
You take your top-performing pages, the ones that actually drive traffic and convert leads, and you build them first to go live with. You then add the rest of your pages over time, using website analytics to understand how pages are performing and make improvements.
With this approach, instead of waiting until 100% of the site is ready to go live 6 months later, you have a new lead-generating website as early as possible. Creating a launch pad website that consists of your best, lead-generating pages is a great foundation to grow your website from.
Find out more about the fundamentals of Growth-Driven Design.
4. You haven’t made changes to your website for months
To increase website traffic and grow the presence of your business online, you need to keep your website up to date.
If your website is out of date – i.e. you have not posted any new content or made any real changes in months – then it will gradually fall down search engine rankings.
So, if you want to increase your organic search traffic, updating your website on a regular basis is essential.
However, making changes without any kind of strategy or analysis won’t do the trick. To make changes to your website that are actually effective, you must see what works and what doesn’t.
Start by identifying which pages are performing well and promote them even more to expand their reach further. For underperforming web pages, think about how you can improve them (take inspiration from your top-performing web pages).
Then, further observe and analyse these pages to see how they are being interacted with. Did a blog post receive loads of views but not as many CTA clicks? If so, changing the CTAs to something more relevant might be worth considering.
Using your analytics, you can make data-driven decisions on how to improve your website.
5. You don’t want to pay a huge lump sum upfront for a new website
Building a new website can cost a substantial amount of money. Compared to a growth-driven approach, where costs are spread evenly over 12 months, traditional website design means paying a half upfront and half on completion.
Traditional website builds can take as long as 6-12 months and in extreme cases, longer. So getting an early look at your website is highly unlikely. In contrast, a GDD website will launch much sooner. You can have a launch pad website, one that consists of your top-performing pages – within 13 weeks. In addition, the website development costs are spread across 12 months and the design and development agency handles all website updates on your behalf.
There is a lot to consider before you decide to redesign your website but choosing a design methodology that sets your website up for growth is a good place to start. Avoiding the huge upfront costs and ensuring your website constantly grows are just two reasons why GDD surpasses traditional website design.
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