Website Optimization Tip:
Keep It Incredibly Simple For Your Visitors

Working at an internet marketing company I tend to run into the same conversations daily. Some of my favorite lines – “Our site is great, we just need traffic,” “My friends nephew (insert any 2nd tier relationship) designed our site,” “I know how to navigate my site.” The beauty of these lines is that once these are mentioned, It’s usually pretty clear what needs to be improved upon. You need to optimize/simplify/update/ your website for your visitors. Much like you optimize your service or product for your target audience, your website needs to reflect what your visitors are looking for. And you need to do this in the simplest way possible and immediately.

As the internet continues to evolve so does the expectations of our visitors. Trust is granted or dismissed within seconds, purchases are made or lost with a few words or images, and their perspective of your business is made instantly upon landing on your site. Today we must design our websites to be stupid simple. Simple/Minimalistic & functional trump fancy/impressive design! It’s true, less is more when done properly. When optimizing or starting your website one of the first thoughts should be “How can I simplify this?”

Unfortunately one aspect they don’t teach in business school is how to optimize a website for conversions. Don’t worry there are plenty of blogs that have some exceptional articles on how to optimize your website for conversions. I will also touch on a few principles and tips that you can implement today.

Principles

Conversion Funnel:

The path a visitor takes on your site that leads to them becoming a client/customer. Or in other words, holding your visitors hands all the way to the end, figuratively of course. When a visitor lands on your site you need to funnel them into a “call to action.” CTA’s (call to action) can range from purchasing a product to subscribing to your email newsletter (Tip: great CTA for blogs, “don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter” inserted at the end of your posts.); CTA is simply just the end goal for your visitor.  You want as little friction and confusion as possible to enhance action on the CTA area.

A conversion funnel is a path. Along that path you are capturing their attention, spiking their interesting, building trust, and breaking down those figurative walls and questions that may or may not be holding them back.  Don’t let a visitor leave your site to continue researching and make a purchase elsewhere, give them everything they need to go from a slight interest to becoming a warm lead or full on client or customer.

Organize:

We all love a well organized room (well all of us OCD types do). Organization is one of those areas we should learn how to optimize and use in our everyday lives, but that’s a discussion for a later date. Organization applies to your website as well. Keeping your website organized will actually have a 2-fold effect, 1) Your visitors will be able to navigate your site easier and 2) you will be improving your SEO value (A topic that desires a full post, but here is a great post by Bruce Clay on Silo’s).

Think of your website as a filing cabinet. You have your main folder, the domain – webdigia.com. You have the sub folders, which are your main inner pages – webdigia.com/about, webdigia.com/contact, webdigia.com/landing-page-optimization. Then we organize deeper, our landing page silo/vertical has information on the benefits of landing page optimization – webdigia.com/landing-page-optimization/benefits. As you can see the benefits page falls under the parent permalink of the main /landing-page-optimization page. Now this is a very broad example of silo’s and barely scratches the surface, but the point is to keep your website organized much like you would a folder on your desktop. If I am looking for the benefits of landing pages, I shouldn’t be looking under the about section.

A simple technique is to put yourself in the visitors shoes. Where would I look to find “X” page?

Simplify Your Navigation:

Website design is still the wild west, there are no set rules on how to layout your site, title your pages, or where to put your navigation. I love a creative layout as much as the next design nerd, but there are some aspects of a website that you should try to stick with the norm.

It becomes habit to look in specific areas and scan for certain text when we are trying to find a page. Looking for the contact page you scan the right side of the nav bar looking for the word “contact.” If your looking for the store you tend to scan the nav bar for the word “store” or “shop” (Though you’ll find store is a lot more popular). When it comes to pages in the navigation bar stick with the norms. You can get creative with the name elsewhere on the page. If you really want the contact page to be called “Get in touch” then put it in the bottom navigation or elsewhere on the page, I suggest trying to have at least one normal name on the page.

Simplify Your Products:

When writing descriptions for our own products or services we tend to blab because we’re excited and proud of them! Everyone is in a hurry and no one has time. Having long drawn out explanations are actually hurting you. There is a place for sales copy and in-depth explanations. Going back to the conversion funnel technique, you need to first capture the attention of your visitor before you can read them the service manual. When you first introduce your product keep everything short but clear. You can have more indepth paragraphs farther down the page, or on another page completely.  Put your sales cap on and think about what’s in it for them. Why would this visitor be interested in this product? What are some sales points you mention when you are speaking with a customer? What are the key features of this product?

As the visitor works their way down the page, you are safe to assume they have an understanding of your product/service and are looking for more details. Again, this is when you can start explaining the details!

I hope you learned something from my thought / rant. Don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter for more random thoughts . And as always, the Webdigia Team is here to help you with all of your website needs.

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