A valuable business is a business worth owning. It’s as simple as that. A business that could fetch a fair price on the open market is usually profitable, growing, efficient and safe—everything we want to see in our own companies. This is why much of the process of selling a business is made up of looking at where you could improve in one of these key areas.
But business value isn’t only for people looking to sell. It’s a concept every entrepreneur should be concerned with. This is because to consider business value, you need to analyze every aspect of the business, a process that naturally exposes what you’re doing well and where you need to improve.
Nearly everything you do in your business affects its value. No action is too small to avoid influencing the overall value of the business. This is because business value is in part determined by revenues. Most appraisers or brokers will start the valuation process multiplying your yearly revenues by 2.5. From there, they’ll adjust up or down based on some of the less tangible aspects of your business.
Since nearly everything we do is an effort to boost revenues, we can say that nearly all we do is also an attempt to boost business value. This makes boosting revenues one of the key ways to business value. And having the right web design can play a huge role in making this happen, just as having poor web design can put you at a serious disadvantage. Here are some ways appropriate web design can boost the value of your business.
The power of color
One of the first things we notice when we land on a web page is the color scheme, even if we don’t notice it consciously. The brain receives the information and makes several assumptions that affect how we perceive the content we’re looking at.
Now the psychology of color is something under debate, largely because these assumptions our brain makes are heavily influenced by our own personal experiences, diminishing the effect of the colors themselves.
But they certainly still have an impact, especially on first impressions. And with a website, where you’re doing all you can to keep people on your site clicking around, this first contact is critical. You need to make sure the colors you’re using on your site reflect your personality as a brand. This way, when people first land on your site, they will immediately begin making positive associations about your company.
Yet the purpose of all of this is to trigger an emotional response with your viewers. Despite the role of rational thought in bringing humans to the top of the food chain, we are still deeply emotional creatures. When we feel an emotional connection towards something, we’re far more likely to engage with it.
In a B2C context, you want people to feel something towards your brand so that they are emotionally inspired to buy from you. This is how you build brand loyalty, maximize Customer Lifetime Value, and profits, and improve the overall value of your business.
It’s important to remember that you can’t garner this emotional response from web design alone; you also need to have great content. But web design is your first chance at steering people towards the emotions you want them to feel. By getting your color scheme right, you can influence the assumptions people make about your brand, enhancing the connection they feel with you, and increasing the chances they make a purchase.
To give you some examples, consider that the color red evokes excitement, youthfulness, and boldness, whereas blue brings about feelings of trust, dependability, and strength. You can find more information about what all the different colors mean here.
Bounce rate and SEO
Performing well with search engines will make your business more profitable and valuable. A large chunk of the traffic that comes to your site will come from organic search, making it absolutely essential you optimize your site for SEO.
To do this, content needs to be your primary focus. You must work on making yourself an authority so that Google and other search engines will trust you with one of their top search engine results. This requires an acute understanding of your target audience and an excellent content marketing strategy.
However, design plays a huge role as well, primarily by helping you lower your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website without clicking any links. Google uses it as an indicator of the quality of your content. The idea is that staying on the site and clicking its links indicates users have found what they were looking for. Google then rewards this by placing you higher up in search results.
Again, content is big. But so is design. You average blog reader only spends 15 seconds reading an article, which means you have an impossibly short window to catch their attention, convince them to stay and inspire them to click on one of your links. The design of your site will have a big impact on these first few seconds, and it can play a big role in determining your site’s bounce rate.
To come off as an authority, you need to present your content and your company in a clean, professional and easy-to-read manner. If someone lands on your site and the first thought they have is “what even is this site?,” there’s a pretty good chance they’re not going to stick around.
Make sure your web design presents your content in the best light so that people will hang around and click on your links, which will give a boost to revenues and search engine performance, two drivers of high digital business value.
Don’t confuse people
Attention spans and loyalty on the web are limited. Doing anything to waste someone’s time is going to cost you. This all-important rule is relevant to web design, too.
Most web developers know that the more clicks you make people go through on their way to taking your desired action, the less likely they are to take that action. So, when talking about a digital business, where that desired action is almost always to make a purchase, your web design has a huge impact on revenues and values.
Essentially, if someone needs to travel too far to get to your call to action, they’re more likely to simply give up and search elsewhere for what they want. The same works in reverse. If it’s easy for people to get to the solution you offer to their problem, then they’re much more likely to make a purchase.
This is where beta testing is so important. When you build your site, or when you make some significant changes, make sure to test it out with people outside your circle before you go live. This will give you an indication as to how easy it is to navigate, allowing you the chance to optimize the journey people take to support higher sales and revenues.
Start making design build value today
While business value is traditionally thought of when it comes time to sell the business, it’s about more than just that. Building up a valuable business means putting together a healthy, growing company that is positioned to stand the test of time. Make sure you have the right design so that you can make the most of your site’s traffic and build a business that is the envy of all digital entrepreneurs.
