Tips for Improving Your Website for the Ultimate User Experience
Can visitors to your website determine what you do within 5-8 seconds of landing on it? Is your website easy to navigate and understand? Does it have content that’s relevant? And, do your social media posts point to your website and give you even more content/information on the subject once you get there?
If not…you may need to re-design or re-build your website.
A website is not just a design. Yes, having a great looking one is important, but it needs to function quickly and correctly (especially by Google standards) and it needs to have relevant and easy to understand content that gives your visitors a pleasant and informative experience.
It should clearly communicate what you do (or offer), where you do it (location) and who you do it for. It’s all about your audience, and how to get them to use you over your competitors. The information that is found when you click on your website should immediately address the needs of your readers. Period.
Here are some tips for improving or re-building your website for the ultimate user experience:
HAVE A PLAN
What if you were a potential customer going to your website? What would you need to see to be engaged in 5-8 seconds? What does the flow from page to page look like? Is there multiple ways to contact you from anywhere on the site? Think about how the site will flow, and make sure that it will be easy to navigate and understand. Your website should answer the right questions, in the right order and move your reader to decision making time- contacting you!
MAKE A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION
When someone lands on your website, you have 5-8 seconds to make a good impression. So, get your main points out there, right off the bat. Use short, powerful, informative sections of content, relevant photos and clear, concise headers.
HAVE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA SET UP AND READY TO LINK
Here’s something that I say to my clients and potential clients EVERY DAY: Having a great website, with great content, that is well optimized only takes you so far in 2018. We are in the age of social media, and if you do not have various social channels set up to drive people to your website, you are missing a TON of branding at the very least…and you’re probably missing out on customers too! Give your users the opportunity to share what you have. It’s like that old shampoo commercial…they’ll tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on…it all works together.
USE IMAGES THAT MATCH YOUR CONTENT
Make sure your images fit your message. They also need to be of good quality, but not so big that they will slow down your site speed. Try not to use stock photos if you can help it, but if you do, they should be as least “stocky” as possible.
AN EASY-TO-NAVIGATE WEBSITE IS KEY
When designing your website, keep in mind its navigation. Map out each page and the flow of where readers can go from each page. If it’s unorganized or confusing visitors will bounce right out of it. Make sure your content is streamlined and responsive. And, give them a way to reach you from multiple places on your website. Make what they are looking for easy to find. If all these things are not in place on your website, readers will leave and go to your competitors.
YOUR HOMEPAGE- IT’S NOT JUST FOR “ABOVE THE FOLD” ANYMORE
Don’t be afraid to design your homepage to include multiple sections to help direct your readers to areas of your website that will help them find what they are looking for more quickly.
It’s up to you, but you can use sections, videos, sliders, product and service features, testimonials, and more. Just don’t make it look too cluttered. White space is not a bad thing.
HAVE A STRATEGY TO BE FOUND ONLINE
If you want to have an impressive online presence, then you need to create a website that can be found online. Develop a strategy that takes into consideration what people that want or need your services will search for (keywords and phrases), location, relevant content and sending people from social posts to the right information (it’s not always your homepage). Also, if you are using a WordPress theme for your website, you can install a powerful plug-in like Yoast to help make sure your content, sentence structure, keywords, descriptions, slugs, etc. are correct and optimized. Or, you can hire someone who can accomplish this for you. It’s a tedious job. But, worth it if it gets you ranked high on searches and more people clicking on your website.
MONITOR YOUR WEBSITE
Does your website run fast enough for Google search standards? Are there broken links or 404’s that you need to fix? Are you having indexing issues? Do you need to update outdated information, or make slight design changes? Are your pages performing the way you intended? Does your navigation tools and your contact pages work correctly? It’s all important. That’s why you should always monitor your website.
KEEP UP WITH YOUR ANALYTICS
Google gives you ALL the tools you need to know exactly who your audience is, what gender they are, how old they are, where they are located, what are they interested in, what device they are using to visit your website, what social site they came from, what page did they land on, and where do they go next from the original page they landed on, how many referrals did you have and from where? You can also set it up to track conversions, how much is each visitor potentially worth…and the list goes on and on. Everything you need to know about your website visitors are right at your fingertips, that’s for sure!
UPDATE YOUR CONTENT AND OFFERS TO KEEP IT FRESH
Don’t just “set it and forget it”! You need to keep presenting fresh content and offers on your website. Not necessarily every day, but update it regularly enough so it keeps from getting outdated and stagnant. A good way to keep things fresh is to include a blog page and post an article or two every week, and push it out on social media so that you will continually have potential customers going to your website. You should also update photos, content and offers from time to time.
It’s definitely not an easy task to create and monitor your website and all that goes along with it, but having it all work well and together will brand your business and bring you customers. Need help sorting it all out? We can help. Call S2R Studios today!