What’s This All About Then?
Parallax, the long scroll, the one page website. They all sound like very different things, right? Well, in fact, they’re not. They are the same style of web design that contain a number of different elements (e.g. who we are, what we do, our products) on one page. The popularity of this format has grown considerably over the last few years and continues to play a central role in the design mix.
The beauty of a Parallax-style site is that viewers can simply scroll down the page and see all of the website’s content without having to navigate to elsewhere on the site. Alternatively, the user can also navigate to a specific section of the page via on-page links or via the navigation menu.
What’s The Catch?
Parallax is trendy, sleek, stylish and visually engaging. So, what’s the catch, I hear you ask? Well, there’s one drawback… Parallax is not easily marketable. From an SEO perspective, a one page website is nigh on impossible to rank in Google.
Imagine for a moment that your competition has an equally cool and stylish website incorporating all the latest web design trends, but instead of one page they have 10, 20, 30 or 100 pages for viewers to browse. Who do you reckon Google is going to send more traffic to? You? Not a chance.
Every single one of their pages has been optimised within an inch of it’s life with a single key phrase that drives people to their website, thus driving lead generation, new customers and PROFIT!
Your trendy looking, one page website will likely have many different topics condensed into a single page, therefore does not rank well for any given high value key phrase, unlike your competitor’s flashy, multi-page, expertly optimised equivalent.
How To Work Your SEO Around This Style
A cardinal rule of SEO is that the more pages you have, the more traffic you get. Every page is a rich mix of fact and figures that will be entered into Google’s search engine index, will show up in searches, and bring prospective customers to the door. Not to mention, having high-quality content on a particular topic basically tells Google you know your stuff. And if Google thinks you ‘know your stuff’, it is highly likely to send more traffic your way.
But remember, any old content won’t do, it needs to be of high quality, add value and be engaging for your target audience, otherwise you can be sure no one will be stopping by again. Building a great looking site is all well and good, but, just like us, we need food and water to keep us going, a website needs quality content to keep it nourished.
There are other issues to factor in when deciding whether to choose a single page, long scroll website too. Most online consumers simply aren’t willing to scroll down as much as you want or need them to. So dropping that essential call to action button at the bottom of the page is a complete waste of time if most of your visitors will never see it.
This is in comparison to a more traditional website design, where you’ll usually find it above the fold, prominent and immediately. Call to actions will also usually be built into the user journey, with prompts along the way, often on each page. Stats have shown that traditional websites have a much higher customer conversion rate than the trendy long scrolls with the call to action buried at the bottom of the page.
If, despite everything we’ve told you about the potential pitfalls of long scroll sites, you still fancy a Parallax site, well, we may have a solution for you. Long scroll sites can be effective, but you’ve got to be smart about how you approach the build and be sure that you have plenty of great content to share.
What To Do Next?
Stay tuned for the next installment to find out how you can achieve that long scroll look, but enjoy the search benefits of a more traditional site.
But in the meantime, if you want to make an enquiry or find out how we can help with getting your website seen online, then please get in touch…