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1. Build Organic Web Traffic

Organic traffic is simply defined as the traffic that comes to your website from the unpaid sources or searches such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

It is crucial to not ignore it as it can play a huge role in the success of your business.

Today, almost everyone is searching online to check out reviews and ratings of a specific product prior making a purchase.

With the constant growth and improvement in technology, a majority of people will be using the search engines to search for products and services they need. Therefore, if you want to make more sales, you must create a reliable and trustable online presence so that people can locate your business’ products and services.

Lack of online presence will only give your competitors an edge in the market. I've seen a massive amount of businesses who does not even have a Google My Business installed whereas it takes just a few minutes to set up and can significantly increase trust, visibility and sales.

Also, optimizing keywords of your product or services, or having compelling content describing your service, will rank your pages higher in the search engines and increase the chances of people accessing your website.

Bloggers or businesses can generate more organic traffic simply by updating their old posts with SEO friendly content and new images.

According to my research, it seems like implementing this strategy, organic traffic can be increased by up to 111%.

And the best part is that organic SEO is pretty cost effective which means it does not require a big investment. I would say the best investment you could make will lean toward a tool like Ahref, SEMRush or SimilarWeb so you can analyze specific keywords, competitor’s organic keywords, backlinks and much more.

If you employ organic techniques, visitors will land on your web page via the normal searches in the leading search engines. The secret is just optimizing the keywords.

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2. Well Designed Modern Website

To me, a high-quality and modern site has to be clean, well-organized, easy to navigate, clear and concise. In addition, it must be modern in terms of style and layout, functional, branded, and accessible to visitors. If it respects all these criteria, then it will significantly increase your chance of keeping users longer on your pages. On top of that Google recognize when codes in a website are clean so it will rank your site higher up for that.

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Information such as opening hours, location and contact information should be very easy to find. Remember, people want fast resolution of problems or quick answers to questions so you must make it easy and visually appealing for them.

Here are 7 “must have” tips to make your website modern in 2021:

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1. Use modern designs throughout your site. According to 48% of visitors, well designed websites increase credibility. If you are not too sure about it, just take a look at the best website designs in your industry – do you notice a common theme or trend regarding the design? Consider sticking with the design philosophy of the most successful websites in your industry, especially if you are a young business that is fighting for recognition in the marketplace.
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2. Make your website responsive to any devices. Nowadays, to improve your user’s experience (a.k.a UX), it is really important to optimize your site when users view and interact with it. A development tool such as Webflow gives you the possibility to build responsive websites for any type of device. You can literally see how your design would look on an iPhone (SE, 7, 8, 9, X, 11Pro), Galaxy (S9, S8, S7), Huawei (P20, P10), Pixel (2, 3), iPad, Galaxy Tab, and much more.
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3. Optimize your website for searches based on keyword research: Keyword research is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO) and buyer information. When people have problems or needs, they do not search the Internet by the type of business that can give them a solution. Rather, they search for the problem itself so make sure you are on top of the new trends.
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4. Develop your site around customer needs and opinions. Just because we are interested in the history, mechanics, and chemistry behind our products or services does not mean that our customers are interested in them as much as we are. For those reasons, make sure to explain specifically what problem you are solving and what differentiate your product or service from your competition.
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5. Display customer reviews is crucial as they are trusted as much as personal recommendations by 72% of users. There are many ways to display reviews on your website but what is important is to have it displayed somewhere on your home page. There is no need to have 500 words. Just display the best parts of the review (or just the first 4 sentences) and create a separate page dedicated just for testimonials and reviews. Also, signing up with Google My Business is something you want to do because when people will search your company, all your infos will be displayed on the right side of the Google search page. It increases professionalism, and more than that, people will be able to quickly see reviews, hours of services, address, phone number etc...
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6. Add call to action buttons to your pages, especially on your homepage. More than 50% of published websites are missing CTAs which is, to me, mind-blowing. You could, not only get an advantage over your competition, but also increase conversion rate, and reduce the hesitation of pulling the trigger on a purchase. 
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7. Use color combinations to significantly improve your website design and its recognition. If I say Pinterest, you think of the color red. If I say Twitter, you think of the light blue. Snapchat yellow, and so on. It is worth spending some extra time selecting colors that go together and stick to them so that returning visitors can easily recognize your website. Part of your branding would be to come up with a color match that is distinctive to your competitors.

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3. Use The Correct Colors For Your Business’ Website

Unconsciously, there’s no doubt that color can influence people when it comes to decision making. But as many people ignore, colors are a little bit more complex than we think. A specific color might have a different meaning depending on the context but also depending on the culture. For instance, in the Western culture, the color dark represents funerals, death and white refers to brides, weddings, and purity. Therefore in China, it is quite the opposite: white symbolize death and mourning whereas black is the color for young boys.

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Now, before I go further, I just want to explain the significance (in the Western culture) of a few colors because it can already help you decide which colors you don’t want on your modern and well designed website.

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Red

Red is associated with insistence, threat, expensive, speed, courage, and power. This sounds like a powerful mixture therefore, it should be used sparingly. According to a study conducted by Joe Hallock, only 8% of people refer to this color as their favorite one.

Blue 

Blue indirectly increases sales. It is a popular color for financial institutions because it is associated with calmness, tranquility, and stability. It is also a popular color when you want people to think about safety and tranquility.

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Most financial and assurance sites use blue. Light blue gives independence and security, and dark blue is linked with tradition, importance, and intelligence. While PayPal makes hay on both sides, other financial services sites have adopted Royal Blue and Navy Blue for their relationship with plain security.

Black

Black is also a versatile color. Some people consider it as a modern design but other see it as traditional, some exciting and some relaxing. Dark websites have been seen as the potential new trends of 2021 according to many designers. It seems like dark backgrounds make design elements stand out more, creating a higher contrast ratio with the use of other colors, but still improving visual ergonomics by reducing eye strain. 

Orange/Yellow

It’s known that colors like orange and yellow are strongly associated with something cheap, fun, exciting, inexpensive therefore surprising that both colors combined are ranked among the least favorite colors by adults. Now, know that you could incorporate these colors into your website while targeting adult buyers but it has to be done strategically.

Green

The relationship with green is with the environment. "Green" is a one-word reference that defines the spread of nature, organic, and globally friendly things. As such, it is used by businesses that want to appeal to, or have similar interests in, similar audiences without a direct connection. Plus, green is becoming more attractive since it combines both the calmness qualities of blue and the energizing effects of yellow.

While choosing the main color for your site, you need to understand that colors need (sometimes) to be cool and trendy but more importantly, it has to align with the message you want to convey. Use colors to communicate a specific message to your audience.

What Are Bad Colors?

Please note that not every color is a good color but that they are bad one. Some colors can strongly distract users from the actual content, or making it difficult for the user to know what to consume first. So let’s see right now which colors are bad for your website traffic:

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Using Light colors on White

White is already bright, so adding light-colored text such as green or yellow to a white background causes readability issues. Bold text helps a slight, but not so much. It's always best to stick to dark shades of gray or black to white.

How to turn Light colors on white properly:

In order to fix this problem, you would want to increase contrast to make your text or image easy to process for your users. Let’s say you have a clear background, then consider using dark blue, or black so it’s easy to read.

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Neon and Rainbow Combination

The combination of neon and rainbow colors is eye-catching. They quickly tire our eyes and, in most cases, only cause annoyance in lieu of the more positive sentiment that companies want their customers to associate with their brand.

How to turn Neon Colors into good colors:

As this issue might seem hard to solve, it is actually pretty simple. And the best way to fix it is by using tones to decrease the brightness of the color. 

Suppose the brightness was at 100, by decreasing it to at least 60 will already turn your neon color into a better color. Then if you want to go even further, you can also decrease by -20 its saturation and voila... less distraction, and less tiring. 

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Too Many Colors

Regardless of the colors you use, too many colors will look bad. You need to find a color match otherwise readers don't know where to start, as many shades can confuse the eye. I usually use one primary color, a noticeable one for all my call-to-actions, and a tertiary color that is lighter than the 2 others and match with both.
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The website below is one of my previous client's one and you can tell that the color combinations are not good at all. There are literally 6 different colors on the same page and this should never happen.
There is a good amount of people who believe that the more color used, the more catchy, so more interest, and more conversion. Therefore, as it might be true in a really short amount of time, your users wouldn’t want to spend more than a minute on your site as it becomes really disturbing and confusing.

How do I know how many colors are enough?

As I’m sure you’ve heard the quote “sometimes less is better”, I guarantee, you can apply these words when it comes to colors too. 

One advice I can give you is to not use more than 5 colors. And after building hundreds of websites, I honestly don’t see any reason why you would be using more than 5 colors.

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If you wish to know the best and easiest way (for real) to choose colors that go together, simply click here.

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4. Custom Vs. Templated Website: Which One Is The Best?

When it comes to building websites, you need to be aware of which experience you want to convey to the traffic coming to your site.

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As neither of these 2 ways of building website will bring you more traffic, know that some platforms using these 2 ways can do so. Popular platforms like Wordpress for instance are able to handle large site visitors and have great SEO capabilities. Other unknown or recent platforms might not have the same power when it comes to SEO and visibility which can affect your Domain Authority and ranking.

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For these reasons, I thought it would be important to understand both templates using websites and custom websites, also discuss pros and cons and decide which one your business needs.

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Templates Using Website

Common way to get started with a website is to set up a WordPress site and apply a template purchased from Wordpress, Theme Forest, Template Monster, or Elegant Themes. These websites offer a wide variety of website templates that you can purchase. Be aware that not all themes/templates are 100% responsive.

There are also themes on platforms such as Weebly, Duda, Wix and Squarespace, and there are also web builders that allow you to edit templates within the frame of your website. These can help you get your website up and running quickly and easily.

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One thing to remember is that templates and themes typically come with built-in features that you can customize for your users, but in the end you'll find that speed and design freedom might not be always as you wish.

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Pros of Template using website

• Saving money is one of the main benefits of using website templates. For less than $100, you can buy great templates for designing your site.
• Coding a website from scratch can be a very long and frustrating experience. This is mainly due to the length of time it takes to write codes. However, the web design template is already coded, which can save you a lot of valuable time.
• If you have problems with your template, you can get help from your template provider. This can take the form of tutorials, phone support, forums, live chat, or a support ticket system.

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Cons of Template using website

• Your site will be less noticeable as many other companies may be using the same template.
• The scope of customizing your site is limited. 
• Not 100% functional on all the devices.
• Some templates are not designed for search engines. You need to modify it for your business.
• Templates run in a structured system, so you cannot install custom or additional technologies.
• Consistently need to be nurtured; you can’t leave for weeks without having to update plugins, theme, and template.

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Custom Websites

Custom-design websites usually start with an imaginative process from the designer to recognize who the target audience is, how the industry reacts to certain website’s style. As opposed to templated sites, custom design can be really powerful and increase brand awareness, trust, conversion and uniqueness.

Custom-design websites might take a little bit longer than themes to be developed. This is because everything is created and delivered for a specific business. When you're building from scratch, it's much easier to respond to your client's exact needs and make sure it works the way you and your client want it. As it is a longer process at the beginning, it can really save you time and money in the long run.

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Mark down that custom websites in 2021, does not mean that you have to hire a developer who will code your entire site. Within the past few years, there have been alternatives such as Webflow, that allow designers to fully custom websites without having to write any lines of codes. 

Pros of Custom Website

• The website will incorporate the company's branding and will be a completely unique design based on your business needs.
• Modified website is flexible to your company's needs
• This site has been tested to work on all browsers and devices.
• This site is built for search engines.
• If you decide to go with a web designer using a tool like Webflow, you can easily edit things on your website thanks to its user-friendly, easy to use CMS.

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Cons of Custom Website

• Customized websites are more expensive than templates.
• The process of creating a custom site takes longer than a template site.
• If you go with a developer who completely coded your website (using a different tool than Webflow) and he/she is not available, it will be difficult for you to recreate or make changes in it. 

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5. Make Your Website Optimized And Responsive

Every website must be built with a specific goal in mind. But as you probably know, this goal will vary depending on the type of business you are running, your target audience, and the desired action of that audience. You might want your visitors to make a purchase, filling out a form, or simply reading an article.

For instance:

• A blogger would want to optimize its blog with the conversion goal of increasing the number of traffic.
• An eCommerce company optimizes its online store to encourage completion of checkouts and repeat purchases.
• An online entrepreneur optimizes its website or landing page to increase the rate at which visitors register for a free webinar.
• A real estate agent optimizes its landing page to capture more potential leads.
• A fundraising campaign optimizes their donation form to encourage more donations.

How do you know if your website is completely optimized?

I've made a rundown of what I believe are the most significant approaches to check if your site is, in fact, advanced:

1. Performance: Numerous apparatuses can check the responsiveness of your site, yet my recommendation would be to use a tool such as gtmetrix or tools.pingdom. These tools will disclose to you the performance of your site; tell you specific things you need to improve on your site such as image optimization.
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2. Speed: You may have a very much structured responsive website, however, on the off chance that your site takes thirty seconds to stack a page, at that point you're experiencing difficulty. For instance, data show that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage after 3 seconds of stacking
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3. Be usable: Have you at any point been to a site and arrived on a page that has a 404 blunder? Try not to stress as it is not your fault; it's only a poor web architecture! These are irritating for the visitors as well as influence the pursuit positioning since Google won't rank a site high if its pages are broken. The best apparatus to test this is Screaming Frog.
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4. ‍Keywords: While you may have made your site or blog two or three years ago, keyword optimization in 2021 is, more than ever, a crucial component for your content marketing strategy.

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Responsive website

A responsive website is an approach due to the innovation of processing devices that have been designed to respond visitors' ways to view a website. It's a web architecture (a.k.a. structures, flexible grids, and layouts) that is acceptable in any size as a user switches from a large work area LCD screen to a tablet or a cell phone.

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In today's age it is easier than ever to make responsive web design, yet, so many websites are still not responsive... WHY?

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One of the main reasons is that some websites have been coded years ago and never been updated or the developer is no longer working with the owner of the website. Which results in a completely outdated website.

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Let’s talk about a few features, plus additional ideas in the making that will help you make a responsive website:

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1. Adjusting screen resolution: A website can't be looking the same on a desktop and on a mobile.
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2. Flexible Image: The best way to make your images responsive is to set the width and/or height as a percentage or viewport. For instance, if the image is set as 700px wide on a desktop and it is not changed for mobile, then the image will overflow while looking at it on a mobile device.
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3. Flexbox: While using this one dimensional layout, you allow your content to be responsive when users pass from big devices to small devices or the opposite. On desktop, your content will usually use rows (horizontal axis) while when on mobile, you are more likely going to display your content using columns (vertical axis).
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4. Responsive text size: There are a few different ways to make your text responsive but the one I like to use to measure my text is simply "px". I guess it is the most common unit since it is used by default on software like Docx, Powerpoint, Sketch, Figma, Webflow etc... Then I just make sure that I change the value of it when it optimize my site for mobile. But you could also use "VW", "VH", "EM" for the size of your text.
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5. Make your menu responsive: Because mobile traffic increased by 222% over the past 7 years, it is a must to have a responsive menu. Usually menus on desktop are a fixed or static navigation bar on top of the site that takes the full width of the screen. Therefore, when you go on mobile, the smaller screen cannot support all the information that are on the navigation bar. For that reason, you must have a dropdown menu on mobile or another fancy menu animation that is designed for smaller devices.

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Summary

Building organic traffic using optimized keywords for your product or service, and a strong on-site website content, can significantly increase your chance of driving traffic to your site.

By designing a modern website, you are giving a good and unique experience to your site visitors which will ultimately make them remember you and want to come back.

Choosing the right colors for your site can communicate a positive emotion to your audience and also have them experience something unique and memorable.

Make sure you don’t rely on the easy way and use templates using websites for your business, instead, consider custom websites with platforms like Webflow and see it as a great investment in the long term.

Don’t forget to optimize and make your website responsive. Google knows more than you think and a non-responsive and non-optimized website will cost you and penalize you.

Recommended Resources by Logan Buignet: If you’re interested in learning more about custom websites, check out my ultimate guide on “Story from selling bad websites to amazing custom websites”, also learn about my “Proven funnel strategy that sell custom websites”, and “The best design builder to sell 5-figures websites”.