Before you begin designing and developing your pages make sure you’ve set clear goals as a company and you’re aligned on the desired outcomes. If you miss this key foundational point, then everything else that follows isn’t worth working through.
Make sure you understand your target audience for your product, event, site, etc. It’s important to take the goals you set and the develop the personas of the customers/patrons you intend to reach.
With your goals and intended audience defined, it’s important to gather data and use it to help fuel or drive the decisions you make moving forward. Use your analytics tools and data from previous sites to understand where you’ve won and lost. This can also be helpful in validating your goals and the personas you intend to target.
There are a lot of tools you can rely on to help you :
Spend time getting to know your competitors and understanding the space. It’s just as important to know how they’re targeting the audience as it is to know how you’re targeting that same audience.
Use Google Search to search for terms you’ll be hoping to target and to see what’s being suggested today. Remember, Google will serve up options based on your own preferences so it’s helpful to use third-party tools, pool resources, and use Incognito mode/
It can also be helpful to set up Google Alerts for topics and competitors to understand what steps/strategies they may be deploying and use this to inform your own strategy.
If you’re building a new site, look at some of your past sites to understand what worked well and what didn’t and use that data to inform how you build a new site. If it’s for a current site, look at the funnel to see where most folks are dropping and optimize. It may be helpful to simplify and drop the funnel and reduce the clicks needed to convert.
As of July 2023, 55% of all web traffic is from a mobile device. It’s imperative that your site is optimized for mobile since that’s where most users will interact with your site. There are markets and instances where this isn’t true, so it’s good to rely on that data we gathered early on to help inform priorities.
What do you want users to do? Let’s use your goals as the bedrock — what is the business goal? What do you need customers to do so your business can attain that goal? Design with that in mind. Cutting edge designs are fun and for some brands make sense, but don’t let your design make it harder for customers to convert.
There are over 1 billion folks on the planet who have a disability and use the internet, but sadly most of the web can be difficult to navigate. Building an accessible site does a few things for you:
Build a site and web that’s for everybody!
If you do some Google searching you’ll quickly find that the performance of your site will impact your conversion rates. If a page is slow to load, laggy, and difficult to navigate then customers will give up. Make sure your site loads quickly and is optimized for mobile devices to increase your conversion rates.
Meganav elements can be great, but they can also muddy the water for users and make it harder for them to get where you need them to go. Make your navigation clear, concise, and accessible. And as mentioned earlier when talking about your funnels, simplify the paths a user needs to take on your site. Clearer and cleaner will almost always provide a better experience. Weigh the choices between your design and your ultimate business goals.
Never underestimate the power of great writing! So much time goes into design and setting business goals and not valuing the content that will live on your site. When designing, you should take a content-first approach based on your goals and personas. Let your copy persuade users to take action!
This is an easy to overlook factor in conversion rates, but trust in your brand/organization/person is a big factor. Fans of certain brands and influencers are going to buy regardless of how complicated your process is, so build trust through all your channels and use social proof and other methods to help convey that trust on your site.
Optimize for search engines. The strategies to do this are fairly well known. Write good content, set your meta content, use structured data, etc. A lot of what was covered in our Strategy and Architecting we can execute on here.
It’s not just about your site. Your ad campaigns, email campaigns, social media campaigns and presence all play a role. If you can build excitement and hype where people regularly “live” on the internet it helps drive traffic and increase conversion rates on your site.
Make sure you have a robust analytics tool post launch to track your progress and to understand how all the changes and work you did are impacting your goals. Track button clicks on add to cart, register buttons, etc.
Use a reliable A/B testing tool and change up your calls to action, your copy, and images to see what helps convert more website users.
Use all this data you’re collecting to analyze, iterate, and get better every day. It’s important to understand that conversion rates and your strategies to improve them need to be a “living” part of your strategy. Trends and user feelings change over time. This isn’t something you walk away from, but instead live with to ensure you’re always doing the best you can to help your business meet it’s goals and to ensure your customers have the best experience.