Experts believe that colors affect our moods, emotions and feelings. Seeing warm or soft colors such as red, orange or yellow can make us feel calm, happy, relaxed and full of energy.

On the other hand, looking at dull or muted colors such as grey, cool blue, beige etc., can make us feel dark and gloomy. The brightness and tone of color have a significant impact on our emotions and thoughts.

For example, red can increase our appetite while also grabbing our attention and signaling our brain that there might be danger ahead.

A research study found that better quality infographics on a website, including warm, inviting colors in the visuals, helped increase the conversion rate of customers by 24%. This is because our brains can’t read and absorb all the information listed on a website, even if it’s divided into small paragraphs and bullet points.

Using the power of colors helps you get the message across to the reader in an easily digestible way. This way, readers can grasp important information on a website within seconds of opening it.

Let’s go deeper into the psychology of color and understand how it can help improve website SEO.

The Role of Color Psychology in the Digital Arena

Color psychology is the scientific study of how colors affect our emotions. It’s a sub-field of the broader field of behavioral psychology. Research published in a peer-reviewed journal claimed that a customer makes up their mind about whether or not to buy a product or a service within 90 seconds, and almost 62 to 90% of their decision is based on the power of color.

The power of color psychology lies in how well you use colors to create a visually appealing site that attracts customers and keeps them engaged. This means understanding how to harness the use of color, tone, brightness, saturation level, and more.

In America, the two most popular colors used in websites are red and blue. However, many customers think blue is a depressing and melancholy color. Hence, the best way to determine which colors to use to improve website SEO is by narrowing down the target audience.

How To Choose The Right Colors For The Right Audience

If you wish to reduce your site’s bounce rate, you need to use colors in the right way, at the right time, with the right audience and for the right purpose.

For example, survey results have shown that women like blue, green, and purple colors and don’t find the colors grey, brown or orange attractive. Most females are put off by these earthy tones and prefer to look at products or webpages decked out in primary colors.

Let’s take L’Oréal for instance. The company targets their shampoos and conditioners and other hair care products mostly to women. Their webpage features two primary colors, white and black, overlayed with purple. The purple color appeals to women, and customers are therefore inclined to buy products from the L’Oréal website based on the site’s color scheme.

Another example is Milani Cosmetics that targets cosmetic and beauty products such as lipsticks and makeup to women. Their site features a black background with pink headers and red highlights. These bright tones appeal more to women and entice them into browsing the site for longer.

The Right Choice Of Colors Improves User Experience

While technical factors such as on-page SEO, loading time and image optimization helps to improve website SEO, you can also use colors to your advantage and create a better user experience for your customers.

Good user experience plays an important role in a website’s SEO, and increases the dwelling time of customers or their return rate. Plus, Google’s algorithm takes user experience into account when ranking sites in search results.

To choose the right color scheme for your website, you need to determine the kind of user effect you’re aiming for. For example, you may use bright colors with bold tones such as red and orange to energize readers and capture their attention.

However, if your website aims to project calm and elegance, it’s a better idea to use soothing tones and warm hues such as light blue or soft lilac.

When choosing colors, you also need to consider their tone and saturation. The color purple with a dark tone can convey luxury and sophisticated chic. However, a light toned purple gives off a playful, romantic and light-hearted vibe.

Decide Where To Use Color For Maximum Effect

You can also use colors to highlight various website areas, such as headlines, borders, buttons or popups, background, menus, sidebars, logo, contact info such as phone number or email address and more.

You may have noticed that most websites use black as their primary text color. This is because black is prominent and easily distinguishable, making the site more readable.
Another important consideration is using the same colors for logo and branding.

Customers interact with a brand’s reputation and are loyal to brands they feel familiar and comfortable with.

Recognition value is important to properly market and advertise your products to see return customers and a higher conversion rate on your website. Hence, if you’ve already made a logo or a design that you use on your products, use the same colors to create a unique brand look that your customer base will instantly recognize.

Direct Your Customer’s Attention With Different Colors

You can use colors as a map to guide your customers along the route you want them to take when they visit your website and decide which links to open or which page to click on.

One way of doing this is to use a different color to highlight a text link’s background, so it captures the user’s attention and makes them curious about the page and the information it contains.

Another great way to direct your reader’s attention is using bright colors for call-to-action buttons. Using colors like red and blue for buttons like “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” makes it easy for users to know where they need to click to take action.

Here’s an example of shopping site that uses black call-to-action buttons:

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Using different colors also makes your headings stand out and sets them apart from the overall web page layout, so they’re more emphasized. For example, you can have a subdued blue color background for your webpage and use a darker blue to highlight and give importance to headings so readers can see how the website is organized.

Improve Readability And Build Trust

Websites must have readable content on their pages for customers to quickly scan the page and gather the information they need.

Using bright colors for text helps improve readability for users, which means they can quickly browse through the website content and be persuaded to buy a product or a service due to its listed advantages.

The colors of a text also help break down the monotony and make the text more accessible to users, especially those with color-blindness. Color deficiency is present in more than 8% of men and 0.5% of women, so to improve website SEO, you need to have readable content using the right choice of colors.

Take a lot at this screenshot of the PayPal homepage with a bright blue color scheme:

Many companies use the color blue to ensure they appear trustworthy in their customer’s eyes. For example, PayPal, which deals with billions of dollars every day, uses blue color in its main theme and branding.

Similarly, websites that want to promote eco-friendly behavior and display their sustainability efforts often use the color green. Green is known to increase feelings of calmness and peace and inspire bursts of creativity. Hence, many websites use green in their call-buttons to encourage their customers to click the button, increasing their conversion rate and improving their website SEO.

This contributed article was written by Joseph Dyson, an expert at how to improve websites’ bounce rates. He offers expert website SEO and link building services to help clients optimize their websites and maximize conversions.

Running a successful business comes with a whole boatload of responsibilities- one of which entails managing your workforce.

Yes, it’s true that your employees are your biggest assets. Hiring the best team members gives you a considerable competitive advantage, placing your business ahead of the crowd.

But employees can make or break your business. Mismanagement on your behalf can unravel years of hard work.

The key is to know how to manage your workforce effectively.

At first glance, it may seem challenging. But with the right plan and strategies, you can make a significant impact.

To help you get started in the right direction, here are some workforce management tips that can help you maximize your employees’ competency and performance.

1. Create a plan

You understand the needs of your business better than anyone else. But this requires making plans to ensure your company grows and thrives.

Research suggests that an effective workforce planning strategy makes businesses nearly 66% more successful than their competitors. It helps boost the performance levels of employees without increasing resources. In other words, you’re aiming for greater productivity without the added cost.

Workforce planning begins with setting realistic, well-defined goals and identifying the right skill set needed to achieve the required results. To improve teamwork and collaboration, state your goals clearly so that everyone aligns with the organization’s mission.

Also, consider devising a flexible plan that allows your business to adapt to changes in market forces, new opportunities, or financial constraints. More importantly, you need to develop practical solutions depending on the experience, skills, and knowledge of your employees.

2. Hire the right team players

As a manager, you know goals and objectives aren’t enough. You need the backing of competent, dedicated professionals that will collaborate and take your company to greater heights. But that means recognizing essential talents and skills when recruiting employees.

Employing the right people with the right skill set will enhance profitability and growth. However, to ensure your workforce reaches its full potential, you need to look at the company’s long-term interests.

More than a third of global executives said they are unequipped to address the skill gap, reports a study by McKinsey. But the challenge is more real for the 60% of businesses that claim half their current workforce will need to be either retrained or replaced within the next five years.

As a manager, you need to plan for where you want your company to be. That begins by analyzing the current workforce and aligning them with your business’s needs while also identifying the future requirements of both your organization and the workforce. More importantly, by recognizing the gaps between these two aspects, you can effectively prepare and plan for your company’s growth.

3. Implement better communication practices

Effective communication is the core component of success. It allows you to pass information to other people so that they know exactly what is expected of them. But more than that, it requires the capability to listen actively. Therefore, good communication skills help build trust, maintain a positive work environment, and allow you to understand your employees better.

Unfortunately, communication is an issue in many organizations. According to the statistics, 57% of employees report not being given clear directions, while 69% of managers aren’t comfortable communicating with their employees.

As a manager, you must have the ability to communicate accurately and clearly. However, good communication encompasses both verbal and written skills. While planning and organizing various aspects of the business are vital processes, it will all be for nothing if your employees are unable to understand what you want them to achieve.

More importantly, communication between departments is essential for fostering collaboration. The 2018 State of Workforce Management Survey pinpointed that 66% of organizations struggle with communication between departments. Executives need to make it easy for departments to interact with each other. Often, it involves removing information silos and promoting the accessibility of data in real-time.

4. Develop a positive environment

One of the biggest challenges of workforce management is developing and maintaining a positive work environment. By creating holistic well-being and an overall sense of happiness, you can eliminate stress and negativity. Moreover, research shows it can boost employee productivity by nearly 12%. Happy employees perform better, work more efficiently, achieve goals, are more self-motivated, and often exceed expectations.

As a manager, you can promote a positive environment by:

• Prioritizing onboarding and training processes
• Encouraging communication by asking for feedback
• Motivating employees
• Being direct but kind with recommendations
• Spreading overall cheer
• Conducting regular check-ins
• Recognizing and appreciating work done right

5. Reward good performance

Everyone likes being valued, and your employees are no different. A survey conducted by Forbes stated that appreciation is one of the most cost-effective techniques for improving employee morale. More importantly, it makes employees feel valued. 69% say they would work harder if better appreciated.

Though a simple thank you or shout-out can suffice, you want to build strong, long-term relationships. Consider offering something that serves as a reminder of their achievement while motivating others to do the same, such as merit-based rewards or bonuses.

6. Create staff schedules

Workforce management demands adherence to schedules. Not only does this keep the company organized, but it helps employees plan their lives outside of work. The clarity in schedules provides the freedom to swap shifts with peers or request vacation time.

For managers, sound employee scheduling systems can:

• Help manage employee shifts
• Allow schedules to be made months in advance yet enable tweaks to be made easily
• Ensure smooth and efficient operations within the company
• Improve productivity and reduce labor costs
• Track the number of hours a worker is putting into the job
• Facilitate labor forecasting efforts to prevent understaffing or overstaffing

7. Invest in the right technology

Thanks to technological advancements, it is getting increasingly easier for executives to manage the workforce. But that relies significantly on choosing the right tools. According to the 2018 State of Workforce Management report, a mere 19% of executives are satisfied with the digital tools currently being used in their organization.

This leaves a lot of room for improvement. Considering there is a whole range of software that you can use to enhance your management skills, begin by identifying areas that can improve by streamlining activities. Studies indicate that there is growing adoption of cloud-based workforce management solutions across all verticals.

For instance:

• HR software can facilitate the hiring process.
• Remote technologies can offer flexibility, allowing employees to work from any location and access data in real-time.
• Communication technologies provide seamless connectivity and keep everyone in the loop.
• Employee scheduling software can help managers effortlessly schedule staff shifts, track work hours, process payrolls, etc.
• Task management software smoothens the flow of work processes and allows employees to complete goals efficiently.

In order to find the perfect tool that aligns with your business’s goals, you need to consider incorporating those that are user-friendly, have a record of being successful, and can be easily integrated into your current tech stack. Factors that executives focus on include:

Popular tools include ProofHub, Slack, Trello, ShiftNote, and Zoom.

8. Review management processes

As a manager, your goal is to increase productivity across the entire organization. That’s a tough job. However, measuring the outcomes of your strategies is an excellent way of understanding whether your techniques are on target or not. Moreover, it gives you a chance to rectify methods so that they produce optimum results.

Another way to review current policies is to get employee feedback. Employee engagement surveys and suggestions can help provide insight into areas that need to be looked into. Listening to employees and implementing regular employee feedback campaigns can help lower staff turnover by 4.9%.

9. Prepare for change

COVID-19 has taught us all a very important lesson- be prepared. In order for your organization to adapt to unique situations, you need to formulate flexible working strategies. Preparing an agile workforce that is ready to continue working no matter what the demands of the marketplace can help you scale at times when others are struggling.

Flexibility is becoming increasingly important. Companies around the world are embracing change to keep their businesses viable in the competitive economic climate.

Under the current pandemic conditions, most employees are working from home. And that means being able to manage work processes remotely. Utilizing the right digital technologies is helping people balance tasks from the office alongside household responsibilities. But generally speaking, by incorporating flexible working strategies, you can improve employee retention rates, reduce overhead costs, and boost productivity.

Final thoughts

Management is a crucial aspect of a successful business. It builds a cohesive bond between employees, bolstering collaboration, increasing productivity, and reducing costs.

But more than that, you need to become a leader. And that entails boosting morale and trust among your workforce. By looking at the bigger picture and thinking of your company’s future, you can plan for improvements, including employee training workshops, incorporation of emerging technologies, expansion of products or services, and much more.

It’s time to take your management skills to the next level.