6. Test and Retest Your Site Navigation and Usability with Real People
Navigation and usability is a fundamental element to search engine optimisation. It is also one of the first things I look at when a potential client comes to Stickyeyes for a consultation.
Unfortunately in most situations there is a Director, Manager or Webmaster that is married to the current design. If we see a need for complete redesign, hopefully we are lucky enough to be given the “nod”, but in most cases that does not happen, so we are forced to change bits and pieces.
Before I touch on some really good tips, let me just say this to the site owners, webmasters and upper-management people out there, if you are not ranking well, not getting a good click-through rate, experiencing high bounce rates or cart abandonment, or you get a myriad of traffic without a minimum of 3% conversion, then you probably have usability issues. Let the marketing people do the marketing.
You have more than one choice;
1. You can let us redesign your website and almost guarantee every element I mention above will be resolved.
2. You can let us create microsites in subdomains with full access to tinker around, test and improve. This way your “top-secret” back-end won’t be exposed (or cause any infrastructure or complicated matrix/server issues), or even allow access to a staging server.
3. You can let us change elements within your current site and test them with the knowledge that we really know what we are doing.
At the end of the day what I am getting at here is that this is a serious fundamental element in a successful website. We typically sit down with 10 or 12 of our best people when looking at the websites functionality. This is about the best focus group you could ever wish to have looking at the website because we also know end-user behavior. Keep an open mind to these types of suggestions because they are usually one of the major problematic issues that most websites have.
So on to the more tips.
Be sure you have definitive CTA’s (Call to Actions) throughout your site, preferably in the navigation bars. These can be Call Us, Contact Us, Get a Quote, Add to Cart, Sign Up, Request Information or whatever. These CTA’s should be in an abridged form that has as few fields as possible. (‘path of least resistance’ – keep it very short.)
I recently looked at a website (a major name that you would recognize) that sells insurance online. Being an ex-insurance agent I know the information that they need to give a quote is certainly not 15 pages long. We actually timed it at close to 16 minutes to complete.
Checkout procedures, whether for an ecommerce site selling widgets, or an insurance company trying to give a quote, should only be information that is required to give a price, and kept to a bare minimum (Don’t ask how or where they found you, if they also want information on something else, or are interested in receiving additional offers…they aren’t and it will hurt your conversion if the user thinks that you may resell their information or bombard them with emails each day) Human nature is the “path of least resistance” and you can scare them off with a daunting list of required fields when all they were looking for was a quick price. People don’t want to have to give this personal information away in the first place and doing it online is an even scarier scenario, but now you want it all!?!?
Another thing, don’t worry about data-captures. You can’t use them anymore for follow-up email offers unless you run them through ‘Can-Spam compliance’. This means the extra step that will cost you 15% of your potential conversions and was designed by some ‘brilliant’ coder to build your email database is worthless without a ‘double-opt-in’ so keep it simple. Give them what they want.
If you absolutely need the information, then using javascript/ajax style forms are great. With these you only show a few fields at a time and if the appropriate radio button is selected, it opens additional fields to be filled in. The entire form is preloaded and will also integrate with a mobile version if you do it right. The idea is that if you get them mentally committed by filling out a few fields, they are more likely to fill out the remaining fields. These menus load quickly and are non-daunting.
Also, add an outgoing link to Wikipedia’s listing on CanSpam compliance. This may help gain you more of the trust element with Google since Google looks at your outgoing links and not just their relevance to the page it is linking out of, but also the trust factor of the website that it is linking to. To them it appears as if you are providing good content using this method. Read more about this in Tip #21.
Placements of “information request” forms are important as well. If you carry 100’s of products, don’t put a “request more information” button or form in your side navigation bar. Put one below each product and add script that will pre-fill the request form out so that all the end user need do is to add minimal personal information. (Tip: If you are in the
For those that are eTailers, or those who have actual physical products that they sell (not necessarily affiliate marketers) and are competitive with their competition and their pricing, put a Low Price Guarantee CTA (call to action) like the one that you see here. You’ll be surprised at the increase in sales opportunities that you will see. I’ve been doing this for 7 years and not only does it lend itself to keeping tabs on competitors that are violating a fixed-pricing structures, but it gives me an additional opportunity to cut the profit to earn a new customer for my client, and grow the lifetime value of that customer. “A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing”
Here is something to think about; what would you pay me to become a regular visitor or customer of your website? This offer includes a bookmark, a few recommendations to fellow users and I will eventually spend a few bucks because I’m ‘getting to know ya’.
My Answer: An amount equal to, or maybe a little more, than the amount that I estimated each visitors LTV (Lifetime Value) is. So whatever I calculate a converting customer’s total average purchases are worth to me. If my average customer makes 3 purchases for an average net profit of £/$25, their LTV is £/$75.
This is great information to have because if you get into paying for online customers, you will use this LTV to set CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) campaigns that sell you customers such as Google Adwords, Affiliate programs, or any of the various avenues for lead/sale aggregation.
As long as I can afford it, I’ll pay you my estimated LTV (Lifetime Value) because I know what a guy/gal like you are worth. You are better than ANY advertisement I could buy. How can I find 10 more of you? How about I pay you to tell your friends I like guys/gals like you? I’ll pay them just like you!
Figure out the value, or what you spend for each customer acquisition and figure out ways to spend it and get more of them buying from you before your competition does.
You will find that earning the trust of an online customer will be much more substantial than any other customer you ever have, or have ever had, or will ever get in the long-term future.
Especially in this new and upcoming age of social media and information exchange, these types of tactics are your number one priority, and this tip is, although not the best one here, another task you need to add to your daily arsenal.
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