The Online User Experience: Getting Visitors to Stay on Your Site
You’ve seen your own website, do you think it will convince users to stay and continue exploring? If it is not conducive to the user experience, it may mean you are losing customers just as they are entering the pipeline. It can also damage your search engine optimization efforts (SEO). The experience a user has is a huge part of your website’s SEO. Search engines like Google and Bing want to give users content that suits their needs at any given time. Whether this is based on an algorithm or AI, Google will try to read the intention behind the inquiry and serve the user what it thinks they are looking for. When something works well, visitors are more likely to follow the shopping experience all the way to the end and hopefully boost your SEO. The team at Lyv Marketing is here to run through some tactics to make the user experience better on your website.
Anticipate Your User’s Needs
Many people that visit your website on purpose or find themselves there by chance will be thinking of many things already. Before they even arrive, they are anticipating the next thing they must do in their presumably busy day. They are not completely focused on your site. Because of this, it is imperative that you make it easy for them to choose the action they came looking to make. Don’t make them look too hard or too deep into your site. Don’t make assumptions about what someone might be looking for at any given time, instead make your whole site a seamless, simple experience from top to bottom.
The Home Page & Needs Met Test
Would someone be able to describe what your website is about just from the homepage, without scrolling? Just from glancing at your homepage, would they be able to tell you what your organization offers, how it will make their life better, and what they need to do to buy? If they can’t answer these questions, the chances are significantly higher that they will leave your site and be lost from your pipeline forever.
The next test we recommend is to see if your website meets the users’ needs. Is your site related directly to the query they searched and does it answer the question they were looking to answer/allow them to do what they set out to do? This is also where Google search rankings come into play. If your site is correctly optimized for both mobile and Google’s algorithm, that is your best case scenario. If your site doesn’t fulfill the majority of searchers’ needs, Google will not rank you very high and people will not click on your site. It’s easy to forget how crucial mobile optimization for websites is, but we have to keep this at the front of our minds when considering search engine rankings.
Keep it Short and Simple
Your site needs to be easy to understand and navigate. This can look different depending on your industry and your target audience, but there are some core principles that remain the same across industries. These include things like:
Clear and simple navigation tabs or labels
Using easily understandable icons (if any icons at all)
Making the text concise and understandable to a variety of audiences
Eliminating unnecessary things that appear on all of your pages (but especially your homepage)
Make your website as simple as you possibly can. If you are jumping between 2 different ways to present a piece of information, always pick the option that is more straightforward. If you are adding forms to your website, make them as simple as possible to fill out to avoid people quitting halfway through completion.
Users Don’t Usually Read Webpages
As marketers and designers, as much as we don’t want to hear or consider it, people surfing the web do not usually read even one entire page from your website. They will quickly scan for what they need and then decide whether to stay or leave after that. The majority of people scan everything they see online, even things like recipes and blogs. Because of this, it is in your best interest to make your site easy to scan. This way people can take in as much of your content as you need them to and go from there. You can also track which parts of your pages users are reading and which they are scrolling past with website plugins. This can help you learn which sections of your website need fixed and which ones are good as they are.
Takeaway: Make Your Website Simple and Straightforward
The easier your website is to navigate, the more likely potential customers will remain on it and continue throughout the entire shopping or consulting process. When you are dealing with your own business, it can be hard to focus on the user experience as opposed to how you want your brand to come across, but it is essential that you do so. If you are looking for a digital marketing team to join you in your business and take care of these things for you, that's what Lyv Marketing is here for. We want to take these things off your plate so you have more time to focus on growing your business. Contact us today by visiting our website and filling out our form at www.lyvmarketing.com.
