Today I talk about something that is a little contentious among web designers and that’s Graphic Design versus SEO. This was always an interesting topic at my office. We did web design for 20 years and you know, I’ve had a few different graphic designers in the life of my companies (and graphic designers are going to be personally offended if you ask for changes). This is an interesting thing because when it comes to SEO, you’re thinking more about what Google cares about and you know, ultimately your goal is to rank number one in Google, right? So in order to do that, you have to make changes to the site. And the graphic designer is not really a search results expert. They think they are, but they really aren’t.
You might have somebody who has a lot of experience in different areas or maybe they went to school and studied digital marketing or communications. And in that case, maybe they do have some additional talents. But when you’re hiring someone to design something, that person is going to care more about the integrity of their design than how well you rank in Google. And they’re going to argue that when someone goes to your webpage that the webpage has to convert them. And so SEO is pointless if you don’t have a good design. Right? Well, so here’s the interesting thing. Studies have shown that the sales message is actually more important than the design. And so if you’re struggling and having issues with your website and you’re not able to convert people, you really should take a look at the message on the site, not necessarily the graphic design.
As we’ve learned for a long time, Google has evaluated websites based on how long it takes for them to load. So if you’re trying to optimize your website, you want to make sure that your website loads within a couple seconds. And one of the great ways to determine that is a tool made by a company called Pingdom, called Website Speed Test. And it’s free. I don’t make any money by referring you to them. But that’s a great resource for you want to check out and see how quickly your website loads and they’ll even break down different components that are taking a long time to load. Usually it’s the graphic design. So I hope that helps you a little bit and points you in the right direction, where to look, to get your pages loading really fast. Then optimize your sales message so that you get the results that you want when people go to your page. If your offer is good, people are going to buy from you. And just take a look at some of the old infomercial products and see how they sell things. And you’ll see some surprising websites that have really poor design qualities, but they are selling like crazy because that’s the goal of business, right? You want to drive sales, and they learned that the message outsells the design. And that’s really what we’re here for. I hope that helps you and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.