Visual Consistency: Building a Cohesive User Experience Across a Website
Establishing excellent visual consistency in your web pages can create a uniform branding style that will take your business to the next level. But what exactly is visual consistency, and how can we help you with it? Well, let’s take a deep dive into this topic — including its many benefits — to show you the light! No matter what market you’re in (and there are many), visual consistency is critical to master. At SEO Locale, we can help you create a visually attractive and consistent design!
What is Visual Consistency in SEO Design?
When we create websites for our customers, we spend a lot of time brainstorming branding concepts, logos, and other visual ideas to create strong visual consistency throughout each site. If you’re still confused about this concept, let us define it for you: visual consistency refers to creating a website with high coherency levels…including consistent fonts, images, colors, and layouts.
Don’t confuse that with “visual repetitiveness,” i.e., making all your sites look exactly the same. Early web designers made this mistake (we didn’t, though) and paid the price. Repetitive designs hurt your SEO by making your site look artificial. Even worse, you could share poor or unappealing styles across several pages and greatly impact your overall SEO score: not good at all.
Instead, visual consistency creates sites that share similar features without being carbon copies of each other. Just think of a site like Amazon to get a feel for visual consistency: each page utilizes similar elements without being boring or predictable. That creates a unique feel for a website to enhance its branding — not bad at all. Just a few things to consider include:
- Fonts throughout all your text
- Color schemes and palettes
- Image types and layouts
- Branding elements (i.e., logos, ads, etc.)
- Page flow (how you integrate all these elements)
- Control bars and other relevant information
By working with the best SEO company Chester County offers, you can take your visual consistency to the next level. Just as importantly, you can rank high in Google (and other search engines) and reach a broader audience. “Okay, that’s great,” we can hear you saying, “ but why does it matter so much? Let’s take a deep dive into the benefits of visual consistency to learn more.
How Visual Consistency Skyrockets Your SEO
If you’re interested in visual consistency, we’re here to help! At SEO Locale, we hire high-quality web designers (both front- and back-end experts) who can produce gorgeous and appealing pages that will draw your customers’ eyes and keep them fascinated. But how can this process benefit you? There are three main benefits that visual consistency provides — let’s check them out now:
- Improve Visual Appeal: Don’t underestimate the importance of a visually appealing website! A site with strong visual consistency is appealing, attractive, and likely to keep customers. That’s huge: if your customer usage time stays high, your SEO goes up! It’s a complex process, and our team at Seo Locale can ensure that you fully understand it on a deep and inherent level.
- Enhance Brand Trust: Just think about brand trust and visible consistency from the user’s level: would you trust a sloppily designed site or one that looks professional and coherent? By building a consistent and coherent website, you build brand trust — which can improve your customers’ experiences and turn first-time buyers into loyal shoppers who will work with you constantly.
- Streamline User Experience: When search engines crawl for appropriate sites, they use various algorithms to check for multiple factors. Authority, diverse content, visual appeal…and easier user experiences. Visual consistency creates a simpler and more authoritative user experience — especially for first-time visitors — to greatly increase your presence in SEO searches.
Before you call us to set up an appointment — we understand your enthusiasm — make sure that you read through the next section to learn more about creating a cohesive user experience utilizing high-quality visual consistency concepts. We’ve done a lot of the hard research for you here but think you should still know exactly what to expect when you work with our team of experts: we got your back!
Creating a Cohesive User Experience With Visual Consistency
When creating a website, we focus heavily on things like consistent navigation, layout, and branding: these all matter! Your navigation bar is critical to visual consistency and should be shared between all your pages. The same is true of layout — to a degree, as you shouldn’t just blindly copy and paste pages — when creating a coherent and effective visual layout. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- Create Design Patterns and Rules: What rules and concepts do you want to integrate? For example, do you want to use contact forms on every page? Or simply have a contact site? Concepts like these can keep your page attractive and consistent…so stick with them!
- Choose Colors Wisely: When choosing a color palette for your site, stick close to your branding. This helps enhance your aesthetics, boost visual hierarchy, and increase brand recognition, further expanding your SEO. Use a color wheel to pick appealing, complementary colors.
- Know Your Typography: Don’t go crazy with too many fonts! It’s important to pick just a few (three or four MAX) and integrate them intelligently. Match your different sections with specific fonts, i.e., give titles or headers unique typographical elements compared to your paragraphs and text.
- Make Consistent Menus: All your navigation menus should be the same across every page — it’s one of the few things you should copy and paste! Consistent menus, buttons, and links make your page not just visually effective but minimize “dead links” and other types of problems.
- Utilize Responsive Design: Integrating responsive design concepts — that change page layout and display based on screen size — not only improves your visual consistency but ensures your site works well on multiple formats: minimizing customer confusion.
Achieving Next-Level Visual Consistency
SEO Locale is the web marketing company Bucks County businesses turn to when they want high-quality work from a team that they can trust. With years of experience and a constantly growing team, we’re here to give you the help you need — no matter what! Don’t hesitate to call us at (267) 368-7905 to learn more…we’ll give you the inside scoop on visual consistency and SEO that you need, including support designing every webpage necessary for your site: we’re here for you!
How COVID-19 Impacted E-Commerce and Paid Search in 2020
COVID Makes E-Commerce and Digital Marketing More Important Than Ever
No one would have been able to predict the catastrophic economic turmoil that many businesses went through in 2020. Thanks to the Coronavirus, 2020 saw the closure of many brick-and-mortar buildings. Unable to transition to an e-commerce platform, these businesses were among many of the casualties of the pandemic. Yet those who were able to make the transition noticed that it brought with it many changes in how e-commerce performs, particularly where Google is concerned. Here is how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted e-commerce and paid search in 2020.
E-Commerce Grew Exponentially
Unable to perform business in their own buildings, many small businesses were forced to transition to an e-commerce service. While this meant that some merely needed to open an online store, others made the switch to a complete e-commerce business structure. Those who made the transition saw that they were able to keep their business afloat, even as spending briefly stagnated.
Yet consumers, thanks to stimulus packages, were still willing to spend their paychecks on essential and other services. Small businesses that made the switch outlived their competitors who did not adapt to the changes brought on by the pandemic.
In particular, those businesses that implemented the winning strategies to bring themselves high on a SERP saw their profits increase. Those strategies consistently revolved around:
- Digital marketing
- Social media integration
- SEO performance
- Emphasis on user experience
Google and Bing Encourage Small Business Shopping with Local Shopping Ads
Both Google and Bing did their part in bringing awareness to local businesses that offered curbside pick-up by implementing new ads. In various places, consumers were able to see local stores that offered the products they needed through curbside pick-up. Even Google Maps introduced new optimized ads to help bring awareness to local businesses.
Bing introduced visual search to their product listings. This was done in the hopes of consumers discovering products easily and making comparisons between prices and product descriptions even easier.
Social media platforms also included e-commerce. Pinterest added a Shop category that allows consumers to purchase goods based on pins. Facebook launched Shops which allows businesses to create an online storefront. Online shops are able to be integrated both on Facebook and on Instagram.
Artificial Intelligence is More Present in Ad Development and Usage
Machine learning has played a key part in the development of ads for Google. Google made a few changes for the automation of ads that emphasize the idea that artificial intelligence will continue to play an important role in ads in the future.
Some of the key areas where automation played a part are:
- Audiences
- Discovery feed
- Search terms visibility
- Automation
Automation and machine learning for audiences have allowed advertisers to target predictive audiences more easily. Using information based on churn probability and past purchases, the data advertisers receive can help them create more impactful campaigns.
Google released Discovery ads from testing and monetized them. Spanning across Gmail, YouTube, and Discover, Google can now boast a combined audience of 2.9 billion users.
Yet Google has also made it more difficult to know what keywords are working in your company’s favor. It seems to be pushing everyone to a zero-keyword future. While they will still release information about certain keywords that see a significant amount of usage, they did not disclose what that significant number would be. This change can make it difficult for companies to know if their SEO campaign is working or not.
Lack of Ad Support for Small and Medium Businesses
Google made a misstep when it announced that it would not be supporting ad rep support for small and medium businesses. It also changed its Google Partner eligibility requirements. However, they did roll out $340 million in ad credits to small and medium businesses to help them transition to an e-commerce platform in the wake of the pandemic.
Need help with your digital marketing or national SEO campaign feel free to reach out to us.