Long gone are the days of making your website unique with background music, Flash images, and a hit counter proudly showing that someone is the 12,749th visitor to your site. People now expect to find what they need within seconds of a search. If your site doesn’t engage visitors with easy navigation, well-written content, and a clear call to action, you’re delivering a bad user experience. Why is user experience important? Because your website leaves a quick and often lasting impression of your brand, and you don’t want that impression to be one of frustration. Would you fill your store with unhelpful staff, use wrong signs, make it hard to get from one place to another, and not even have a cash register for purchases? It may sound absurd, but that’s what you might be doing with your website without even knowing it.
Provide a Full Mobile Experience
Today’s visitors want more from their mobile and tablet experiences, making it crucial for your website to use responsive design. Responsive websites automatically adjust to the size and orientation of any device, ensuring a complete website experience for everyone. In the past, businesses had to create separate sites for mobile phones and tablets, which led to extra costs and often frustrated users due to inconsistent experiences. Nowadays, users frequently start browsing your site on one device and switch to another. Responsive design ensures a consistent user experience, fostering positive brand interactions and enhancing their journey toward conversion.
Provide Engaging Content
Your visitors are coming to your site because they’re hoping you have what they need. That need could be an answer to a question, a desire to find a product they’re in need of, a login for a more personalized experience, or an article that will give them better insight and understanding of their world. Whether your site lives up to their expectation is up to you. While you can’t have the supply to every demand, you can make your site as content-rich as possible to ensure that you’re providing the best possible answers, goods, or information as needed. If you’re a financial institution with a great track record of providing an easy process for first time home buyers, you should have compelling text supporting that on your Mortgages page. Of course your site should present factual product information but resist the urge to provide them with paragraph upon paragraph of this information. Instead consider presenting key points in an easy-to-digest bulleted format followed by a clear explanation of your process. Complementing this could be a testimonial from a customer, a blog post written by a lending agent, and helpful tools for visitors like mortgage calculators and current rates. If a visitor gets to your site and can’t find information to back up your offerings, they’ll move on to someone else who does, regardless of whether or not they’re the better option.
Prioritize Ease of Use
Now that you’ve established that your site will have compelling content, you have to decide where to put it. If someone is truly engaged with your site, you may still only have their attention for less than two minutes. Your overall goal is to get visitors to easily navigate from the point of entry to the point of conversion. To do so requires an analysis of your business and marketing goals, while balancing visitors’ key goals. Like solving a puzzle, you will need to determine how your content can fit into logical buckets, how you can have scalability as your business grows and changes and how to present your most popular information and links prominently. “Mega menus” allow visitors to dig into deeper site levels without multiple clicks, and breadcrumb navigation is another user aid to facilitate site navigation. You will also want to be mindful of avoiding internal or trendy jargon when naming pages and instead rely on keyword research, site search data and good old fashioned common sense. Finally, once you’ve worked hard to get visitors to a page, make it immediately clear what you want them to do.
Clarify Point of Conversion
The best websites immediately guide the visitor to their desired action. Whether a conversion for your site means placing an order, opening an account, downloading a document, or submitting a form, the visitor should immediately know what to do and be able to see this action immediately when they load the page. Proper tracking of conversions allows you to update your site content and layout to drive an optimal number of conversions. If you have compelling content and no means of conversion, you’ve dropped the visitor out of the flow. They may convert at a later point by coming into a brick and mortar location or by calling a representative, but do you really want to risk losing them while you’ve got their attention?
Prioritizing Web User Experience
Most marketers work tirelessly to drive leads to their website. Once they arrive, it’s essential that the experience they get is a positive reflection of your brand and your commitment to making their lives easier. The sites that win the game provide a consistent experience no matter the visitor’s device, provide useful and engaging content, allow a visitor to find what they want quickly and allow them to fulfill their intent to convert.