How Design and Imagery Can Increase Your Website Valuation

Image quality, placement, and website design are important to gaining conversions from your site’s traffic. 

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Amassing traffic to your site can be simple with pay per click (PPC) ad campaigns, but converting this traffic requires a completely different skill set. A conversion is any action completed by your traffic that leads them deeper into your sales funnel—completing one desired action after another until eventually purchasing your product or service (at least that’s the goal). Traffic signing up for your newsletter or downloading a recent PDF guide you published are examples that would be considered conversions.

The fact that you’re reading this blog means you understand the importance of including images in your content, and you know how to optimize your images for SEO. But few understand how these improvements and this knowledge can be used to increase their business valuation. It’s not only about changing the placement of the images, but finding different images that fit your brand. Before we dive into how all of this works together, let’s cover how online businesses are valued.

When it comes to planning an online business and growing from the ground up, you may not be aware that other entrepreneurs who are just like you would be willing to buy your business. If this is a new concept to you, and you’re interested in learning how much your business is worth, this simple formula will give you a basic idea:

 

Sales Price = 6–12 Months’ Average Net Profit x Multiple (Typically 20–60+)

 

Net monthly profit is usually determined by looking at the average of 6 to 12 months’ revenue and subtracting any costs (cost of goods, marketing/advertising, hosting, virtual assistants, content, etc.). Some of the factors that determine what your listing multiple will be include the following:

 

• How long the business, site, or platform has been around 
• The amount of new and existing traffic you receive 
• Conversion rates
• How large your email list is (if you have one) 
• The margins for your most profitable products or services
• Any graphic designs or downloadable and printable assets included with the business

One of the biggest opportunities to increase your business valuation is performing conversion rate optimization (CRO) on your website. CRO is a systematic approach to figuring out what gets your traffic to complete a desired action (a conversion) on your website. 

 

Increasing your conversion rate means the more your traffic grows, the more potential that traffic offers in converting to paying customers. When it comes to performing CRO on your website, however, you might not have any clue where to begin. In this post, we discuss the importance of web design and the images used on your site and how these things affect your business valuation. Let’s begin with your website design and how it might impact your multiple. 

Having a clean, professional-looking website is key to gaining trust from new and existing customers within your market. 

 

If your website looks muddled because of too much written content on the home page, and if the reader doesn’t get who you are and what you offer within a minute or less, you may end up losing their interest. Your website’s home page design should be easy to navigate and straightforward.

 

Try to think of ways you can improve the sequence your customers go through from first landing on your site to clicking that final checkout button in your payment portal. The sequence through your sales funnel should be streamlined and effortless. Each call to action (CTA) should be geared toward getting that traffic deeper into your sales funnel before reaching the final step: becoming a paying customer.

 

When it comes to increasing your conversions using the design of your website, keep important content within ‘the fold’. If you’re not familiar with what ‘in the fold’ means, it is a term used for any content within the immediate window of a submitted URL.

As you can see from the image above, important calls to action are within ‘the fold,’ or within the browser window, when someone lands on the webpage. Having important CTAs like your newsletter sign-up form, one-click social media sign-up buttons, and easy to navigate menu bars within ‘the fold’ will guide your traffic to take action. 

 

When you design a website with your customer in mind, you can present content and products in a way that explains who you are and what you offer right from the start. Building a clean home page gives your traffic a better user experience, and that gives them more reason to complete a CTA. Another important process of CRO when it comes to optimizing your website to increase its value is A/B split testing.

A/B split testing is one of the primary operations you can use to CRO your website. If you’re not familiar with what A/B split testing is, the process consists of testing two variables. These variables include things like color, copy, or CTA placement on your site. Once you’ve tested different variations of your CTAs, you’ll know how to set these options to something that converts the most.

 

Other types of A/B split testing for the design of your website include testing your background images (more on this later) and going even more granular by testing the typography you use. Testing your font size, color, and even typeface can help increase engagement with your content and might even uncover a look that’s more suited for the type of content you provide. Having a well-designed website is important not only to looking professional but also to gaining the trust of your traffic. With a professional-looking website comes professional-looking images.

If you’re not constantly testing the placement of your images, CTAs (forms and buttons in this case), or any other media currently on your website, you’re leaving money on the table. We don’t mean the placement of your blog’s featured image and small things like that; we mean the images and placement of your CTAs on your site’s pages. Everything should be tested to see if placing these items in different locations could lead to higher conversions.

 

Don’t try to force an image onto a page if it clashes with the content used to get your traffic deeper into your sales funnel. Just as bloggers refrain from adding background images to their posts, try to avoid any images that are unnecessary or uncommon for similar types of content within your market. Less is more in this case. The fewer distractions you have going on with odd image placement, the more your traffic will focus on CTAs.  

 

The placement of your advertising image boxes is also important to test, as this can have a huge impact on increasing your net profits. Because your net profits make up a good chunk of how much your online business is worth, you should explore every way possible to increase this number. Whether you choose to have display ads on your site’s sidebar, within your blog content as row images, or in banners above your navigation bar, these should all be tested. 

 

One content site owner who purchased a display advertising and Amazon Associates business from our marketplace was able to 4x their monthly net profits with this method. They started by reaching out to Mediavine and asking for their display ads to be geared toward their audience’s interests. Next, they A/B split tested the placement of these ads across the whole site; within weeks, their net profits increased thanks to CRO. 

You should now have an idea of how you too can increase your website’s valuation using simple web design techniques and optimized image placement. If you’re curious about what your online business is worth today before making any of the CRO improvements mentioned here, head over to our free valuation tool to compare what other businesses similar to yours are being sold for. Knowing what your business is worth today will give you direction for the improvements needed to increase your monthly net profits through optimized web design and imagery.