Once upon a time, website owners were flummoxed by two competing desires:

• Website design and content that was compelling, usable, useful, and pleasurable for human visitors
• Website design and content that was optimized for search engine optimization (SEO).

The information architects—the people who design pages with human users in mind—often were at loggerheads with the SEO experts, who wanted pages that web crawlers could find easily and rank highly in search results. Depending on which party had more clout on the web implementation team, a website might end up optimized for one at the cost of the other.

Happily, progress in search engine technology has changed SEO best practices to the point where you don’t have to sacrifice the usability of a website in order to eke out a higher search ranking. 

In business, there’s a common saying that data is king. Whether your target audience is business professionals or general consumers, at some point you’ll need to present a message that relies on figures to generate sales or increase market share.

How can you do this effectively? Sure, infographics are a tried and true method. But often, this medium misses the mark because of cluttered designs and irrelevant or unsupported data.

In this scenario, it’s best to stick to a cleanly designed chart. If you’re planning to not just display data on your website, but leverage it to make effective CTAs, you need to focus on maintaining UX principles for a consistent user experience throughout your website.

There’s nothing wrong with the tried-and-true SEO tactics we grew up on. Link-building, long-tailed keyword focus, and quality content are as relevant today as they ever were, but these basic strategies aren’t the only tools in the SEO marketer’s arsenal. Below, we’d like to review a few uncommon-yet-important SEO tactics that you might not be aware of.

Web design trends come and go, making their mark on the digital landscape before a newer, more innovative design tactic takes their place. That’s the nature of the web design game.

It’s smart to brush up on web design trends every year and incorporate them where appropriate. It’s also smart to take a look back at what worked, what didn’t, and what trends are best left forgotten.

Are you guilty of trying to keep an outdated web design trend or tactic alive this year? Here are a handful of design trends not worth your time in 2019. 

Many business leaders decide to hire a web design agency in order to streamline the design process without sacrificing quality. It’s a smart decision, especially when you need to meet brand expectations but you either can’t afford to hire an in-house web designer or when doing so, it just doesn’t make sense.

There are a number of considerations to keep in mind when searching for the perfect-fit web design agency, and there’s also a degree of responsibility you need to own once you’ve found the best agency or designer to meet your needs.

It’s important to be prepared and have a plan of attack to help web designers understand your goals and how they can provide solutions. Here’s what you need to know, how you can prepare, and what you can expect after hiring a web design agency.

Half of consumers who do a local search visit a store within a day, and 78% of local-mobile searches result in offline purchases. In case it isn’t clear, local SEO is kind of a big deal. It’s no secret at this point that the cellular phone has become a bonafide human appendage. If you’re not throwing up a flag on the internet, you’re basically nonexistent to the growing portion of humanity that navigates life through their cell phone. Local SEO is a prerequisite for any store looking to wrangle some offline foot traffic.

The issue with local SEO is that digital marketers are all over the place when it comes to tactics, making it difficult to lay out industry standard best practices. Priorities span from on-site optimization to social media and email marketing to website design. If you’re new to all this, the confusion and lack of consensus can leave you scratching your head wondering how to leave your local footprint. A good strategy moves forward on multiple fronts. Luckily, we’re here to highlight the winning routes to building a quality local SEO strategy.

Adaptive content has several characteristics. The content reformats itself for differently-sized screens or platforms (without any input from the publisher), and it presents, in a dynamic fashion, different chunks of content based on the interface used. Together, it’s a type of content publishing automation that provides easy distribution across platforms.

Aside from the backend efficiency, this is the best way to communicate with your customers. It cuts through the limitations of publishing platforms and guarantees that each piece of content is delivered exactly the way it should be.

Typical keyword strategy involves optimizing your content for a limited number of keywords in a given piece—often no more than one or two. This single-keyword approach was a product of its time; search algorithms weren’t as advanced as they are today, and building an SEO profile was as simple as optimizing each page for a single-string term.

Things work a little differently these days. Search crawlers are now sophisticated enough to detect multiple topics and contextual clues across indexed content, and individual keyword strategies don’t hold the clout they used to.

To look at it another way, crawlers are no longer the limiting factor in keyword optimization. Why be satisfied with a few keywords when you could optimize for a hundred?

Interactivity is a popular design choice, and it’s easy to see why.

Traditional web browsing is a static experience. Users are no more than passive observers in your marketing funnel, with little agency or control over how they consume your messaging. But interactivity changes the game and lets users directly engage with your site. In most cases, this adds a new dimension to your messaging that improves the overall value of your UX.

It sounds great on paper, but is it necessary?

You’d think that by 2019, web designers would have come to a consensus on how to build proper web forms. Unfortunately, we still have some work to do in this area.

Your web forms are the unsung heroes of your landing pages and CTAs. They’re the data capture tool standing between your website and your viewers. And while adjustments to your web forms might seem minor compared to the slew of other website optimizations you should be making, they actually have a huge impact on your users’ UX, not to mention your conversion rates.

Keep an eye out for the following issues in your web design.