5 Successful Ways To Improve The User Experience On Your Website

When it comes to the best website user experience (UX), many businesses put their trust SOLELY in a web developer to create the customer journey. But, why?

As a business owner, you know what you want your customers to do more than anyone else! So, it’s up to you and your marketing team to define value for your customers and create moments where your customers decide to engage.

As you audit your web design and user experience, look for ways to eliminate friction in order to increase customer conversion. Take a look at these 5 easy tips for improving website user experience and visitor conversion.

Tips to Improve User Experience and Conversions

Before going through these tips to improve user experience, we suggest conducting a quick audit of your site. The best way to do this is to approach your site like a brand new customer (possibly discovering your site from social media or an ad on Google). Are you able to quickly get to the action you want your customers to take? How could you improve the flow?

With more data and better visualization of your website through the customer’s eyes, you can make more precise decisions about your website’s UX.

1. Study Your Visitor Behavior

How are people navigating and clicking on your site? The best website user experiences usually come from data and tracking. With Google Analytics, conversion tracking and heat mapping tools like Crazy Egg, you can see the actions that your visitors are taking as soon as they land on your site.

There are also tools called scroll maps (something Crazy Egg also provides) that follow a user’s scrolling. Hot spots appear in white and red and show when people stop to take a look at the content (or even click). In other cases where the area shows as blue, visitors scrolled directly past the content or even abandoned the page.

All of these tools help to highlight user engagement, as well as pain points. Are tons of site visitors dropping off at your cart or checkout? Do they view the portion of the homepage that’s above-the-fold and leave? These insights can help drive the course of your site’s UX design and improve conversion.

2. Improve Your CTAs

A call-to-action button may seem like it should convert on its own, but many websites don’t stylize their CTA buttons and links to stand out. It’s important to separate your CTAs and give them a style, such as a button with a shadow or bolding the font in your links.

Your CTAs should highlight the most important action that you want your visitor to take. If the visitor lands, and the first thing they see is a “Submit” button beneath a form, they have learned nothing about the value they may get on your site. Instead, make your CTAs relate to the content, like “Elevate Your Website’s SEO” or “Hire Expert Digital Marketers” Use CTAs that mean something to your customer!

3. Simplify Design Elements for Your Consumer

People don’t spend time reading, and if your page load speed is greater than a few seconds, customers will likely go elsewhere for the content. That’s why your design has to load quickly and get straight to the point.

Whether you have an online store or a landing page with a form and CTA button, it should be easy to identify every important element and see the value immediately. Your website visitors won’t stick around to read through paragraphs of text or find the right CTA to click.

Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

  •  Add 1-2 lines of persuasive text above a form
  •  Make your text simple to read
  •  CTA buttons should be enticing to click
  •  Keep your CTA short and focused on value
  •  Add 1-2 bullet points below your header to explain value (if on a landing page)
  •  Highlight your best products above the fold and use different CTAs if you have a slider

Your visitors should be able to land on your homepage and immediately see the value that they were looking for. If you get most of your traffic from paid advertising, your landing page should be tailored to the campaign that the user clicked on. (It’s never a good idea to send these visitors directly to your homepage unless you have incorporated a campaign’s message throughout the site.)

4. Define What Needs to Improve and Test It

Once you’ve gone through your website, collected data from your scroll maps and heat maps, and visualized the funnel on Google Analytics, it’s time to improve pages that should be converting but aren’t.

The best way to implement change is through an A/B test. For example, if you have a page that isn’t converting as much as you’d like, then take the data collected and create a “B” landing page to test against. Half your visitors will be shown the original “A” page, and the second half will be shown the new “B” landing page.

After setting up your test, it should only take a week or two to see which page really stands out. If your conversions aren’t going up on either, then perhaps more changes are needed on your “B” test (change the headline, simplify your form fields, or swap out the images and videos).

Eventually, you’ll get a clear winner and a better picture of which page is delivering the best user experience.

5. Improve Your Content to Get Visitors to Stay

Did you know that 70 to 90 percent of your visitors will never return? The average time a visitor stays on a page is 2 minutes and 17 seconds. If you can’t get a conversion in these couple of minutes, your visitor will likely leave. This is why content marketing is so important. Good content makes visitors stay on the site longer, and good website design will help funnel those visitors to convert.

Low conversion rates may very well be due to your content. What do audiences get from your competitors (and other brands) that they don’t get from your website? Perhaps you need a blog, or maybe you aren’t providing enough detail in a fun, visual way.

Here are some ideas:

  • Be strategic in where you place images, videos, CTA buttons, and product links
  • Create exit-intent pop-ups and discounts that only fire when visitors intend to leave the page
  • Be engaging with your visual content – don’t just use stock photos
  • Format your content so that it’s easy to read with multiple headlines, quotes, bullet lists, images and videos

Today’s audiences like to skim pages, looking for individual bits of information that answer their questions. While some visitors need more time to make a purchase decision, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to drive them to a sales-focused, multi-level marketing page. Instead, keep the users engaged by showing them value with your internal links, concise content and high-quality images and videos.

Need a Hand to Improve Your Website’s User Experience

Designing a great user experience is rarely done alone. At iSynergy, we can help interpret all the pain points of your website’s design and visualize your funnel to see what can be improved to increase conversion rates. Then, you can confidently run organic and paid digital marketing campaigns to drive even more qualified leads to your business!

 

Start improving your conversions today.