One thing that can drive all of the visitors that you have worked so hard to get away is a website that has terrible usability. It won’t matter how much time and effort you place into an internet marketing campaign or how many users you drive to your website because most of them will abandon your website without converting. You better hope one of the internet marketing sources you are using to drive traffic is PPC because you will be throwing all of that money down the drain. So our Phoenix web design team would suggest working on improving your websites usability prior to running any type of internet marketing campaign. You may be asking what type of things can I do to improve my websites usability? Well, I am glad you asked because I want to show you some things that you can do that will drastically improve your websites usability.
- Many times users will get to a website and have no idea what the website is about how to use the website. That is why on the home page you need too make sure that visitors to your website will know exactly what it is about within a couple seconds of visiting your site. Most of the time people are looking for specific information and if they don’t think your website has it they will likely leave your stie within a couple seconds. To add insult to injury they will likely go to one of your competitors.
- Your website should provide sitewide links to make it easy to get to pages no matter where at on the site your visitor may be. I can’t begin to count the times I will visit a website and leave a page and not be able to find my way back to that page. This is an extremely frustrating experience that is why you need to make sure all your pages are accessible by 1 or 2 clicks and they should be accessible from any page on your site.
- Your website should load up within a couple seconds. These are not the days of dial up when you would have to wait a minute or two between each page you visit. People nowadays are much more impatient and expect to be able to see your website within a couple seconds. The longer your page takes to load the more likely it is that your visitors will leave your site.
- Now I am sure that you have heard content is KING and that is true especially when it comes to search engine optimization but you need to lay it out in a way that it doesn’t feel like a book. When people are surfing the web most of the time they are not there to read. They skim to find what it is that they are looking for then they move on. That is why if your website has a lot of content you need to lay it out in such a way that it is easy for your visitors to skim through.
- I have harped on this in many of my blogs and this one isn’t any different. You MUST make sure that your website is mobile friendly. It is likely that this will be the year that the amount of mobile internet users pass the amount of desktop and laptop internet users and this means that many of your visitors will be viewing your website from a mobile device. If your website is not optimized for mobile then everything you have done to optimize your website for desktop and laptop users goes out the window when somebody visits your site from a mobile site. If your website isn’t currently mobile compatible then I would strongly suggest biting the bullet and updating your website as soon as possible.
- TEST TEST TEST TEST did I mention you should TEST your website? Prior to launching your website you need to test your website thoroughly. Go through and test all of the functionality of your website making sure that users won’t run into issues after the launch of your website. After your website has been up and running you will want to continue to go through testing your links and other functionalities of your website just to make sure that a link has changed and that everything is still working properly.
Getting users to your website is only half the battle the other half of the battle is getting visitors to convert. Every website has something they are wanting their visitors to do. To increase the chances of your website visitors converting you need to make sure that the usability of your website is as good as possible.